


Catalyst

by AtticusKaine



Series: Our Stories Burn Bright, Hung Like Stars in the Sky [2]
Category: The Owl House (Cartoon)
Genre: But also just a fun little aside from another fic, F/F, Ficlet, Friendship, Rivalry, Skarscha, The result of a comment that I just couldn't stop thinking about, vinera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28505871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtticusKaine/pseuds/AtticusKaine
Summary: An accounting of the Greenhouse Rebellion of 8:37 pm, Third of Agrippus, 405th-year post-Separation, as gathered and described by those who were present. May the Titan have mercy on our souls.
Relationships: Boscha & Willow Park, Boscha/Skara (The Owl House), Emira Blight & Willow Park, Emira Blight/Viney, Skara & Gus Porter, Skara & Willow Park, Viney & Willow Park, Willow Park & Gus Porter
Series: Our Stories Burn Bright, Hung Like Stars in the Sky [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2079384
Comments: 67
Kudos: 54





	1. Rebel Yell

**Author's Note:**

> There's really no better way to explain this. I included a throwaway line about a plant rebellion in a recent chapter of my other fic, and it ended up turning into this. No, I do not have self-control. No, this is not required reading for that fic (which you can find in the end-notes of this chapter). Yes, it is hilarious. Enjoy.

* * *

**cat·a·lyst**

/ˈkad(ə)ləst/

_noun_

\- a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.

 **\- a person or thing that precipitates an event.** ****

* * *

**-The Warden-**

If she had been asked, later on, to choose a precise moment where things went from the usual brand of Boiling Isles weirdness to something entirely unique and strange, Willow would have probably settled on crashing the coronation of a potato. The fact that it really was a lovely little scene only made it worse. Especially when, immediately after tearing a hole in the wall of a rundown shack that might have otherwise been the seat of a monarchy, she could only stand to the side as a flock of ink-crows stormed the throne room, falling upon the attendees like a storm of dripping, gleaming death.

She was fairly certain the creatures didn’t need to eat, but the witch next to her hadn’t been very forthcoming when she’d asked her. And were they _laughing_?

_Honestly, it was probably better if she didn’t get an answer to that question._

Instead, Willow glanced to her right, reassessing her impression of the witch in question. Technically, Emira was an illusionist, but the crows she’d summoned were anything but fabrications. Humming to try and drown out the sounds of carnage from within, Willow summoned her scroll, opening up a shared note between herself and the other members of their paramilitary group and crossing “ _Solanum nobilis_ ” off the list.

She shuddered as one of the crows, a scrap of potato in its beak, fluttered out of the tear in the wall and landed on her fellow witch’s shoulder. This one was larger than the rest, her feathers an iridescent black rather than the dripping pitch of her flock. With a little pang in her heart, Willow noticed that the bottlecap crown that had previously rested on the (top, head?) of a rather noble-looking tuber now rested jauntily on its head. 

“Aww, Badb, did you find a souvenir?” Emira asked her palisman, turning her head to nuzzle against the crow’s beak before it fluttered to the tip of her staff, its wings drawing into itself as it completed its transformation into an ebon effigy of itself The bottlecap clattered off to the side and Amiera sighed sadly. As she reached down to pick it up, Willow could see the emotions warring across the witch’s face.

“Willow, are we the bad guys here?” She asked suddenly, voice thin.

“Why are you asking me?”

“Well, you’re the plant witch,” Emira replied, gesturing towards the tableau between them, “Figure if anyone knows how to feel about this, it would be you.”

“I’m…” Willow began, trailing off. How did she feel about this, exactly? They were potatoes, roots, and under any other circumstance she’d have no problem eating them. But as one of them attempted to make a break for it, little root legs scuttling across the earth and through the gap, an ink-crow darting out after it, talons biting deep and dragging it back into the shack, she couldn’t help but feel bad for the unfortunate little creature.

“I’m conflicted,” Willow admitted at last, unwilling to meet Emira’s gaze. She caught the illusionist nodding out of the corner of her eye, seemingly satisfied with the non-answer.

“I almost hate asking you to see if there are any left then,” Emira replied, voice apologetic.

“No, it’s fine,” Willow sighed, “someone’s gotta do it.” Drawing a spell circle up between her hands, the witch closed her eyes and pushed her magic into the earth around her. One-by-one, little lights flashed against her shut eyelids; each a flickering representation of something living, breathing, _being_. Which meant that the world around her was full of them. Focusing the spell, she narrowed her search to the area immediately around the building in front of her.

Sure enough, the ink-crows had done their work. She shuddered at the way they came across as little voids in her lifesense, at the way they picked across the ground, hunting down every flicker of light and snuffing it out with brutal efficiency. As the last of these executions concluded, her shoulders sagged, and she dismissed the spell. Turning to Emira, she nodded. By the look in her eyes, it was clear she understood.

_Their work was done._

Emira whistled a low tune that never failed to send chills up Willow’s spine. The flock poured out of the hole in the wall, practically a singular mass of dripping feathers and sharp, nib-like beaks. As they flashed past her, Emira lowered her coat to her elbows, revealing the pale skin of her upper arms to the night air. One-by-one, the ink-crows broke formation, diving towards their mistress and melding with her skin on impact. 

Willow had never gotten a straight answer out of the (self-professed) eldest Blight about just _how many_ of the creatures she and Viney had managed to capture, but by the time the last of the beasts had vanished from the sky, her arms were covered with realistic, glimmering images of her own personal corvid swarm. She turned to Willow, eyes conflicted, mouth opening to speak, and right as she formed the first word, the ground behind her exploded.

~---~

Vision narrowed to a point, Willow closed the distance between them in an instant, her left arm pushing the illusionist behind her and her right already forming the circle to call her armor. The twisting mass of white, tuberous roots that caught her in the arm threatened to knock her off her feet, but the hastily-formed armor there held. Her feet, roots of their own newly sprung from the earth, dug into the ground and held against the sheer mass of the creature.

_It was a potato._

Oh sure, it was this awful mass of twisting, pale limbs and a jaw set with shards of jagged stone, but the body of the thing was still a potato. She should have known that picking up a few of them off of Eda was a bad idea. There was no telling how they’d react to the Isles. Some plants just withered the moment they crossed the boundary, others mutated into strange and (occasionally) dangerous new forms. She’d been delighted when the potatoes had just sort of… sat there. Not really doing much, but at least not causing problems for her. The last thing she needed was more problems.

_And then one of the greenhorns had gone and mixed up the fertilizers._

Which was quite the strange confluence of events that had found her grappling with a multi-limbed potato monster roughly the size of a bear and twice as ornery. Her armor finished growing across her form, the faceplate settling into place and lighting her lifesense in the process. Green fire outlined the world around her, allowing her to pick out the center of this creature’s life force - a blazing orb of white fire just behind its gnashing jaws. Once she knew what to look for, she could see it, a little black bulb the size of her fist.

Her attention was distracted by another eruption of clay and earth, and then another, and another. As one beast after another pulled their way free of the earth, her confidence flagged. None of them were as big as the creature whose jaws she was slowly prying open (lucky her), but they were quicker to make up for it. As the first scuttled towards her, she briefly contemplated how you’d carve “eaten _by_ potatoes” on a tombstone, but a sudden burst of strength from the monster in front of her drove that thought from her mind.

Gritting her teeth, she rooted herself deeper into the ground, gasping aloud at the strain on her legs as the creature pushed harder and harder against her defense. Her left arm joined in the chorus of pain as the right left it to fend for itself, forming a spell circle that flashed green and called a thorny vine to drive through the creature’s flank. It gave her the space she needed, its attention momentarily diverted, and she found her own drawn to Emira as a burst of magic sent ripples of power across her lifesense.

The illusionist had dodged past the first creature, and whatever spell she’d cast seemed to have drawn the attention of the other four as well. Staff in hand, she spun magic to life around her form, ink-crows fluttering free of her shoulders and _condensing_ behind her head. With a single motion, the crows-turned-knives flashed forward, cutting one of the beasts to wedges and pinning another in place.

_Well damn._

Suitably convinced that Emira could handle herself, Willow brought her focus back to her own problems. The creature redoubled its assault, another arm darting beneath her defenses and striking her in the chestplate. Roots snapped and the witch skidded back, a vine wrapped arm darting out to a nearby tree in order to right herself. Seizing on the connection, she reeled herself out of the beast’s path. It stumbled past her, new-formed legs scrambling to find purchase against unfamiliar earth.

Turning to face it, Willow had just enough time to catch Emira dissolve into a flock of crows, her body reforming on the flank of one of the smaller beasts, before the charging form of her own foe filled her sight. Stance wide, eyes forward, the witch rooted herself even deeper into the earth. This thing was strong alright, but it wasn’t anchored the way she was. And when push came to shove, she refused to let a broiling _potato_ push her around when the strongest witches in the Construction track hadn’t so much as managed to budge her.

The impact between them was _loud_ , thunderous even, but both held firm. Luz had mentioned that she was practically an immovable object on the battlefield, and Willow found herself liking the comparison. She was a tree, an ancient one, gnarled and unyielding to the worst nature had to offer. She _would not_ be moved, and as the creature’s strength waned, she began to push back. First gaining a few feet, and then, when the creature had the idea to root itself, simply taking that strength and using it to force the creature’s jaws apart. 

Crying out in defiance, Willow let go of the creature’s lower jaw with her right hand and drove it into the gaping maw. Jaws of flint and slate met armor of vine and bark, _immense_ pressure driving down on her arm, but she gritted her teeth through the counterattack and poured even more strength into her left arm. Straining, effort breaking past her lips and turning her cry into more of a snarl, the witch pried the creature’s fangs off of her arm and drove her right hand further still, seizing the core of its being and _pulling_.

There was no reason a potato should be able to scream. Absolutely none whatsoever. But it did. Titan, it did. This awful, rending, mournful sort of tone that _creaked_ out of its body as she pulled its very essence from its body. Resistance at first, fangs scrabbling at her armor in panic, but then a slight give that broke into a full, awful ripping sensation as she _tore_ the bulb free. 

The beast’s body shuddered for a moment before falling limp, hitting the earth with a solid thump that ushered in all the sensations she’d been blocking out with it. The once-dull, now-sharp cutting pain in her arms let her know that, no, her armor had not been enough to keep its fangs from meeting her skin. The faint whistling noise that echoed from behind her as Emira made quick work of the smaller beasts. And the nausea, this overwhelming sense of revulsion that found her tapping at the side of her faceplate in a desperate attempt to get it open.

Cool air hit her face a moment before she decorated the ground in front of her with what was left of her dinner. Trembling, she realized that the bulb was still clenched in her hand, and she immediately dropped it, trying and failing to kick it away while her body wracked itself with aftershocks.

“You alright Will- Oh,” came Emira’s voice from behind her, which she responded to with an open palm and a shaking head.

Dimly, she registered the sensation of a hand patting gently against the shoulder plate of her armor, but she was more focused on trying to get that _awful_ sensation out of her mind.

“I’m fine,” she replied, even though she wasn’t, but how do you explain that visceral of a reaction to killing a _potato_ , “just wasn’t ready for the way that felt.”

“Yeah, first time’s never easy,” Emira replied, voice distant.

“You killing potato monsters without me, Blight?” 

“Besides the ones back there? Not quite.”

“Ah,” Willow responded, because there was not enough time to unpack _all of that_. Really, there wasn’t enough time for her little breakdown either. So she gritted her teeth, wiped her mouth, and looked up to find Emira just tapping away at her scroll.

“Oh no,” she snarked, “no need to worry about me. Not having an existential crisis or anything. Feel free to send flirty messages to your girlfriend while uttering cryptic references to your mysterious past.”

“Sorry,” Emira replied, genuinely apologetic, “Viney was keeping me updated on things from on high, and last she checked in was over fifteen minutes ago.” 

Willow felt a chill run up her spine. Gus and Skara had been with her, trying to locate more hideaways with their magic combined. Trying to quell her panic, she summoned her own scroll, but seeing that neither of them had checked in either only served to stoke it further.

“I can’t help but have a bad feeling about this,” she muttered, earning a nod from Emira.

“She’s still up and conscious,” the illusionist added, “that much I can feel. But I have no idea about anything beyond that. She’s too far away.”

Willow nodded, agreeing. Her own Bond with Gus may not have been as strong as the one between Emira and Viney, but she could still feel him, faintly, at the edge of her consciousness. Too far for her to pick up on any emotion, but close enough that she could tell his essence was still going strong. Still, it wasn’t like him to fall behind on updates. He knew how important it was that they get things under control quickly. 

“Can you pick up on a direction?” Willow asked, “Because I can’t.”

“I think so…” the illusionist replied, trailing off as she closed her eyes. Willow felt the slightest _pulse_ of magic emanate past her, and not for the first time that night, she wondered just how much power Emira was working with that she could feel it even when she wasn’t trying to.

“Crown-and-bay-ward,” Emira replied, pointing in the direction she’d indicated. “She’s fine, I think, but she’s agitated too. Nervous, even. _Speaker’s Oath_ , love, what are you doing.”

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s on the ground, which is _not_ what we agreed on.”

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Willow assured, not quite able to keep the edge of disbelief out of her voice.

“Be that as it may,” Emira replied, flinging her staff to the ground in front of her, “none of them are fighters, and she wouldn’t have broken a promise unless she had no other choice.” Rather than hitting the ground, the staff came to a rest about three feet above it, Badb’s wings stretching wide from her position atop it. Emira settled onto the length of it sidesaddle, reaching a hand out to Willow as she did.

“Care to join me and get our fool Bondmates out of the trouble they’ve inevitably gotten themselves into, Miss Park,” Emira asked her, wolfish smile not quite hiding the worry in her eyes.

Dismissing her armor to cut down on weight, Willow nodded her assent. She’d barely settled onto the staff beside her fellow witch before they’d shot off into the air like a comet. Their target? The pillar of smoke that she’d just noticed curling over the darkened woods, pitch black and growing, and directly in the path of where Emira had pointed. Willow drew in a breath at the sight of it, but took a moment to calm herself. She needed to be prepared, ready to face whatever they might find.

_Their night, it seemed, had only just begun..._


	2. Black Smoke Rising

* * *

**grudge**

/ɡrəj/

_noun_

**\- a persistent feeling of ill will or resentment resulting from a past insult or injury.**

_verb_

\- be resentfully unwilling to give, grant, or allow (something).

* * *

**-The Bard-**

Far above the forest, one hand tangled in the fur of a griffin, a witch with silver hair blinked past wind-drawn tears, the other hand tapping away at the surface of a scroll. Skara sighed as her finger hovered over the send button, shaking her head as she tucked it into her jacket instead. Things weren’t that bad yet.

And as far as nights on the town went, she’d faced a lot worse than rampaging plant monsters and freezing griffin rides. 

“You two still holding on back there?” Viney called back to them, her voice somehow carrying over the wind that whipped past them.

“Doing our best!” Gus responded, ever the optimist. Skara didn’t bother hiding the fond smile on her face. Leave it to the fearless president of the HAS to actually _enjoy_ the least comfortable form of travel in the Isles. Then again, Viney seemed okay with it too, so maybe _she_ was the problem…

The griffin bucked and shook under them, dropping a dozen feet in half a second and leaving her stomach somewhere along the trajectory. The beastmaster clinging to its shoulders had the audacity to _laugh_ as it did, and Skara’s smile turned to a scowl.

_No, she was the normal one. They were just weird._

Her mood certainly wasn’t made any better by her slowly freezing fingers. She’d love to put on her gloves, but gloved fingers couldn’t pull off the delicate motions required to work the bow harp - and without the bow harp, there was no reason to be up here in the first place.

So Skara gritted her teeth, flexed her fingers, and drew the bow across the third and fourth string. Keen ears caught onto the slight deviations in the tone, and she pressed her will into the instrument, lacing every note with her magic and forcing them to the earth below. She’d hardly waited a moment before Gus’ magic latched onto her own, and her eyes opened to find mist swirling into the space between them. 

The terrain far below sprung up in miniature, little trees and boulders formed from dense patches of mist, the barest flashes of motion indicating the presence of life. At first, it had been simple enough to pick out the invaders from the world around them, but they’d since pruned away the biggest offenders. All that was left were the small fry, but there was no telling how many of them were down there, and they were a lot harder to pick out from the air.

“We’re not going to find anything else this way,” Gus groaned, echoing her frustrations. Turning to look up at the sky, as if scanning the stars for inspiration, his enthusiasm faded ever so slightly, and Skara felt a pang for him.

_Wait, the stars…_

“What if we had a better way to visualize?” Skara asked, suddenly excited.

“What, like a crystal ball?” 

“Exactly like that.”

“That’d be great,” Gus admitted, looking down at the dissipating illusion, “but we’d need a pretty intense ball to be able to handle two different kinds of magic like this.”

“The Oracle students just got Tiresias-grades in for their final projects,” Skara replied with a smirk, tucking her bow harp into her pocket-conservatory. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if we took one for a spin.”

“And if they did?”

“You make some convincing doubles for us and they can sick their monsters on those instead.”

“Fair enough,” Gus replied, nodding. “Hey, Viney,” he called ahead, making her jump, “think you can set us down in front of the school?”

“What happened to search-and-destroy?” She asked, turning to look at them over her shoulder, which was just a _wonderful_ idea while they were mid-flight.

“Same plan,” Skara responded, “just with better hardware.”

“Hey,” Viney replied with a shrug, thankfully turning back to face the air ahead of them, “you’re the brains of the operation. Better hold on.”

“Better hold-”

“Lowell, dive!” The beastmaster cried out, and the world dropped out from under them.

Skara’s words, or rather the breath to make them, were torn past her lips as they plummeted towards the ground. Viney whooped in exhilaration, Gus joining in after a moment, and she contented herself with holding on for dear life, muttering silent prayers to the Titan that, if they did crash, to kindly not place her anywhere near the two of them on the other side.

Judging by Viney’s relieved smile, the awful clattering and scraping that followed was apparently the way a griffin was _supposed_ to sound when it landed. Gratefully, Skara let herself slide off of its flank, patting it more to reassure herself that she’d made it off than to show gratitude for the ride.

Gus smiled at her as he followed her down, the same relief across his features. Affection surged for the younger witch in her heart. They were an unlikely pair, but he’d helped her come out of her shell when it came to her secret love for human music, and she’d resolved to be a mentor for him ever since. Titan knew he needed it. Which made it extra annoying that he’d gone and started growing up on her.

He conjured his staff and set it on the ground beside him, the tentacles of his palisman curling slightly as the octopus atop it animated. Something about the way it moved seemed off. Shifty, hesitant, almost as if…

“Gus!” she warned as the flagstones ahead of him exploded, curling tendrils of _something_ shooting towards him like a pair of arrows loosed. Her breath caught in her throat as they pierced his form and tore him forward, only for it to release as his stunned face flickered and collapsed into mist. 

The hand that grabbed her arm was firm and familiar, and she’d barely had a moment to acknowledge that he wasn’t actually being eaten by whatever had grabbed him before Gus pulled her off to the side. 

Lowell screeched and hissed as he pulled away, flapping wings adding a storm of dust and sharp stones to the chaos. She closed her eyes against the assault and _felt_ , rather than saw, another tendril just barely miss her head. Forcing her eyes open against the impromptu dust storm, she got her first half-decent look at the thing through her tears.

Massive and bulbous, with a body like a barrel open at the top. Hinged to it was a sort of cap, an upper jaw even, ringed with teeth around the rim. Those same tendrils, far too many to count, emerged from its form at every conceivable angle, passing quickly over the ground around it in what could only be described as a mad, scrabbling search. 

Gus turned to her and nodded, that same maddening grin on his face as he began to spin ink and fog out of his staff. Grinning despite herself in turn, Skara reached out to the air, counting down a 6/4 before a familiar, short-necked oud landed in her hands. Not for the first time, she was glad to have kept everything in her repertoire tuned and ready to go. Maybe it wasn’t great on the instruments, but it’d saved her life more than once.

Now, for example.

Lashing feelers met cutting sound and failed to break through, falling in pieces at her feet. She laughed in triumph, cutting off to a gulp as a solid third stopped their search, turning directly towards her.

“Thorns.”

_As death raced towards her, she couldn’t help but wish she’d hit send. Even if there was little chance it would have done her any good. Even if the person on the other end hadn’t responded to a single message before it for over a year._

The sound of something screaming in pain jolted her back to the present. Lowell had somehow managed to interpose himself between her and her doom, Viney spinning her magic to life on his back. With a burst of healing energy, the griffin’s wounds sealed, expelling sharp tendrils with a chorus of pops.

“I get that this isn’t exactly normal, but we could really use some help here,” Viney hissed back at her, eyes still firmly locked on the creature.

Skara shook herself, hands shooting to the strings of her oud as she nodded in assent. Even if Viney couldn’t see her, she was right. She’d played Grudgby before, granted, only one-on-one with Boscha, but still. Heaven, she lived in the _Isles_ of all places. Monsters were an everyday occurrence.

Her fingers _tore_ across the strings of the oud, striking into the opening notes of a riff it was definitely not meant for, but that was half the fun. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught how Gus (or at least, she was pretty sure it was Gus) dodged out of the way just the slightest bit faster. How Viney’s staff managed twice as many rotations in the same amount of time.

Sure, she wasn’t a fighter, and Boscha had never failed to get a ball past her, and she’d basically always played a supporting role when it came to things like this, but she was damned good at it. This thing _did not_ know who it was messing with.

She was Skara _broiling_ Jubal, Singer of Praises, top bard out of thirty in her class; a veritable prodigy. She worked magic that witches ten years her senior couldn’t hope to manage. She was dangling ten feet off the ground, upside-down.

_Wait, what?_

Two of those feelers had managed to sneak past Lowell’s defense and were currently wrapped around her ankles, smoke curling up from their grasp. It became clear why when they bit through, the acidic touch forcing a scream out of her throat that turned all eyes to her.

Viney darted to face her, only for another three tendrils to whip across Lowell’s beak and send him careening up into the air despite her protests. Gus broke into a sprint towards her, one double after another getting run through and poofing out of existence each time he… _stepped on a feeler._

“Don’t step on the vines,” Skara gritted out, biting down a scream, “I don’t think this thing can see, but it can sure as hell feel you stomping on it!”

Gus paused, and she forced herself to even out her breathing, to push the pain in her ankles to a little corner of her mind so she could focus. It worked for about a second, but then there was no fabric left for it to burn through, and the world went white.

_Heat, fierce and bright, but not at her ankles. Rushing air, and then a pair of arms beneath her, strong and familiar. As her vision cleared, she could just make out the edge of the jaw, and her heart dropped when she recognized it._

And then they were running, ducking under feelers and acid-laced tendrils alike as breath coursed over her skin and booted feet pounded the earth beneath her. The throbbing in her ankles drained away entirely, physical pain forgotten as something harsh and sharp tore its way through her chest. She pulled away, no, she set her down, and Skara realized she was just in the entrance to the school. 

Gus slammed into the door next to her, pulling it shut in time with the newcomer. Through the steadily narrowing crack, Skara caught a glimpse of Viney waving them on as she drew the creature’s attention, the griffin beneath her screeching in defiance. The sound cut off to a muffled roar as the heavy doors of the school met and sealed, leaving the three of them alone.

And then their eyes met, livid reflected in gray - two to three. She’d always had her at a disadvantage on that one.

Boscha looked about as good as she normally did lately, which was to say, not that great. She hadn’t even bothered putting on makeup; the sort of thing that would’ve been a cardinal sin for the witch Skara’d used to know. Even her clothes were nothing like her. Just a drab grey coat pulled over an equally monotone flannel and jeans. The boots were at least familiar; they’d been a birthday gift. Skara had never been sure if they’d made it through the mail, but at least she had an answer to _that_ question now.

“What are you doing here?” came the next one, passing her lips before she could bite it back.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Boscha replied with a huff.

“Oh, so you _can_ respond to me?” Skara snarked back.

“Can we not get into this now?”

“Uh, guys?” Gus asked, the sound of it only barely registering in her mind.

_Sorry Gus, you’ll have to wait a sec._

“No,” Skara insisted, heat flaring into her tone, “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why my best friend totally ghosted me for a _broiling_ year.”

“I wasn’t ghosting you-”

“Oh no, you just didn’t respond to any of my texts, my calls, my letters - oh, nice boots by the way, wonder who got them for you?”

“Pipes, please,” Boscha pleaded, and she did not care for that nickname _at all_.

“Don’t you _dare_.”

“Guys?” Gus asked again, worry creeping into his tone. She wanted to pay attention, really, but this was a long time coming.

“Listen,” Boscha huffed, turning away from her, “now’s really not the best time.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Skara responded in mock apology, “would you like me to wait _another_ year before speaking to you?”

“Guys!”

“What?” They asked in unison, scowling at one another as their voices overlapped.

“In case you forgot,” Gus said pointedly, turning to Skara, “we have a job to do.” She flagged under the accusation in his tone. She couldn’t remember a time when Gus had raised his voice to her, let alone been _mad_ . “And you,” he said, turning to Boscha, “I _really_ don’t like you, but that’s beside the point. Thanks for helping Skara and all, but why _are_ you here?”

Boscha looked away from the illusionist, seemingly unable to meet his gaze either. She let out a breath, long and low, before meeting his eyes.

“Someone’s been stealing ingredients from the potions lab,” she stated, the implication clear in her tone.

“And the professors didn’t catch that?” He asked, suspicion creeping into his own.

“No, they wouldn’t. I’ve been… keeping the books for them,” she admitted, fixing all three eyes firmly on the ground between her feet, “The ledgers and all that. For extra credit.”

“Bosch,” Skara said quietly, “you’ve never needed extra credit in potions.”

“Yeah, well, things change, don’t they?” Boscha replied, fists clenching at her sides as all three eyes locked on her.

“Okay,” Gus cut in, a hand up between them, “but what kind of things?”

“Little things,” Boscha replied, that same confidence that always reared its head when she was talking shop peeking through, “Never the sort that would arouse suspicion. Little bits and pieces here and there, the kind that someone could easily use too much of in an experiment. No professor can watch every student, so they’d be none the wiser. But if you put it all together…”

“You’d get plant monsters?” Gus queried.

“You’d get plant monsters,” Boscha confirmed, “amongst other things...”

Gus and Skara shared a look at the unsettling implication of “other things.”

“How long has this been happening?” the bard asked, taking over as Gus craned his neck to glance out one of the front windows.

“No way to be sure,” Boscha responded, “There are little discrepancies throughout the books, but I’ve only been keeping them for a few months. I only noticed because someone got sloppy and used too much.”

“And you didn’t think to bring it to their attention?”

“Professor Flamel said that it was nothing,” the alchemist insisted, “That I was reading too much into things. He’s old, but he’s not shady,” she added, noticing the look the other two witches shared, “If anything, he just doesn’t want to fill out the paperwork. So I figured I’d come check things out after school. See if I could find the books from before I started and line things up.”

“You have keys?” Gus asked, surprised.

“What, only boy-prodigies are allowed to have them?”

“How did you-”

“Not important,” Skara interjected, nevertheless stowing the thought away for later, “What we need to focus on right now is getting what _we_ need.”

“What are you looking for?” Boscha asked, suddenly curious. 

“Crystal ball,” Skara responded, “Tiresias-grade.”

“Like the Oracles just got?”

“Exactly,” Gus interjected, dropping down from his ledge. Skara spared him a quizzical glance, and he shook his head. Made sense; the windows had been spattered with some kind of goo during their fight. Visibility couldn’t have been great.

“They’re not going to like that,” Boscha warned, drawing her back to the conversation.

“If we do this right, they’ll never know it’s missing,” she replied, unable to keep the sly grin at the familiar sensation of cluing the witch into her latest mischief. 

“Fair enough,” Boscha responded, driving the knife deeper when she met the grin with one of her own. Only problem was, it didn’t even come close to reaching her eyes. It was hollow, empty even, and entirely unlike her.

“You’re… not going to ask us what it’s for?” Gus asked, glancing sidelong at her.

“Figured it’s something to do with that thing out there,” she replied, pointing to the door and earning a pair of nods, “and if you two are working on it, it’s way beyond me, which covers a lot of things actually.”

The way she said it so… dismissively. More than anything else she’d said or done, that left Skara damned sure that something was up with her. Something big. Internally, she felt something give way ever so slightly. Sure, she’d ghosted her, but she’d known the witch since they were in diapers. If something had her this down...

“Boscha-”

**_WHOOM_ **

Something hit the doors behind them. Well, not “something” in that she didn’t know what it was. There was really only one guess. Which meant that it’d either gotten tired of chasing Lowell and Viney or... No, Viney was brave, but she wasn’t stupid. At least, Skara hoped that she wasn’t.

Still, the doors were warded against all things physical and magical. It would take a dragon to knock them down. Or... it would, had the wards actually been _activated._

“You wouldn’t happen to know any warding spells?” Gus asked the two of them feebly, grimacing at the negatives he got in response. “Right, wonderful. Boscha, grab Skara, we’re making a run for it.”

Before she could protest, Boscha had scooped her up and broken into a dead sprint behind the illusionist. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out, because the doors splintered and shattered against the weight of the creature, this booming bullfrog croak echoing from somewhere deep inside its form as tendrils flooded into the hallway ahead of it.

_Alright, maybe this was the worst night she’d had on the town after all._

**-The Illusionist-**

One thought ran through Gus’ head over and over again as he just barely kept ahead of the plant monster hot on his tail.

_Bless these long legs._

Oh sure, the growth spurt had been an absolute nightmare in just about every sense of the word, but at least it gave him the stride he needed to avoid certain death. Boscha kept pace with him easily, but he’d expect no less from the former captain of the Banshees. What made it really impressive was the fact that she was doing it while _carrying_ Skara.

That one still hit his heart with a pang of worry. Her scream while the creature had held her in the air, that awful shriek as its acid bit into her ankles, Titan, it still echoed in his mind. Made all the worse by the fact that he had a pretty good idea of what the plant had been before its transformation. That he knew exactly what sort of fate she would’ve met with if Boscha hadn’t arrived in the nick of time.

Pushing the intrusive thought down, Gus focused on running. Out there, with nowhere to go but potentially hostile forest, it had them at a disadvantage. But here, in familiar halls and on home turf, they’d gleaned the slightest bit of a chance. Now if he could just get to one of his tunnels…

Three tendrils shot ahead of them, braiding around one another and melding into a single, arm-thick vine that dripped and sputtered with acidic bile. He watched as a wave of raw force rippled along the vine, traveling up its length like a wave, before spraying that same acid down the hallway between them. Acrid smoke curled up from where it met the flagstones, stinging Gus’ eyes and forcing him to one side of the intersection it had split in two with the attack.

Through the cloud, he could dimly make out Boscha curled protectively over Skara, one arm reaching into her coat. In a single smooth motion, she pulled a phial from her jacket, uncorked it with her teeth, and downed the contents. Tendrils lashed towards the pair faster than he could cry out, but fire met them instead, a plume of green flame shooting from Boscha’s mouth, her own defiant cry layering over the blood-curdling shriek from the creature behind them. 

Her eyes met his through the smoke, a question flashing between them, and he waved them back, towards the east wing of the school. Not waiting for a response, he darted down the hallway behind him. The west wing might not have held the Oracle classrooms, but it did have its fair share of shortcuts and cutbacks. Hopefully, he was smart enough to outfox a pitcher plant. If not, well, he always had luck.

And if that failed, he always had Fleming.

See, every palisman had an innate spell that came with them - something tied to the sort of creature they were. There was a reason most witches chose things that could fly, after all. That sort of on-demand flight was a hard gift to pass up on. But Gus’ palisman had been inherited, and if there was one thing Grandpa Porter had been scared of, it was heights. No, the octopus that capped his staff had an entirely different sort of magic at its disposal. Only problem was, it was shy. Hated to use it in front of other witches. Something about keeping an “ace up the sleeve.” 

_At least it was kind enough to let him know when that wasn’t an issue anymore._

The moment Skara and Boscha must’ve turned the corner, Fleming tapped Gus’ shoulder, and a wild grin split his features. Spinning the staff once, twice, three times to charge it up, he thrust it forward, and the world ahead of him seemed to _compress_ and draw to a point. With the barest hint of released will, he Reached the end of the hallway in an instant, a cloud of floating ink left behind him. 

Turning to face the charging creature, Gus spun his staff back to life, pulling as much magic as he dared into the cerulean circle that sprung up in front of him. Just for the hell of it, he decided to take the opportunity to practice his conversions.

It was thirty yards out when he’d decided on the form his illusion was going to take. Twenty when the first jagged outline of its form sprung into the space between them, mist curling into frills and horns, scales and smooth, weathered skin. Ten by the time its non-existent bulk settled onto the floor between them, tendrils cutting through it, finding no purchase against its illusory form.

_At five he pushed enough magic into it to make it solid._

It may not have weighed the full ten metric tons, but he’d poured more than enough magic into it for the creature’s momentum to be absolutely robbed by the triceratops he’d magicked into existence in its path. Well, _Triceratops Horridus_ , to be exact, but he doubted the pitcher plant cared. It was probably more concerned with the horns that had pierced its bulbous hide only to burst into so much mist at contact with the acid contained within.

Either way, he didn’t stick around to ask it, ducking instead into a nearby classroom in the confusion. The moment he saw the podium, he knew he’d guessed right. Purple stains around the bottom and a stool behind it was all the confirmation he needed that it was the Abominations classroom, the supply closet attached to it holding an entrance to one of the few tunnels he could still fit in. He stumbled as he ran for the door, the exertion of that large of an illusion adding on to the wear he’d already been feeling. 

The smell of something burning hit his nose the moment before he reached for the doorknob, and he hit the deck instead. More tendrils still ripped through the door from the other side a moment later, finding nothing where his head had been a moment earlier.

_Of course the thing would be in the tunnels. It had ripped out of the ground earlier, hadn’t it?_

Gus blanched at the thought. If it was in the tunnels, then that meant it could be anywhere in the school. Or everywhere, if it had had enough time. Titan, it had been _waiting_ for them. If they hadn’t dropped by, it might have gone entirely unnoticed. His stomach turned at the thought of the students walking in tired, unsuspecting rows into the literal belly of the beast.

Gritting his teeth, the illusionist forced himself to his feet, quickly assessing just how royally screwed he was. Tendrils all around him, the creature forcing the bulk of its body through the door, acid spitting and eating away at the frame. All he needed was a space, an opening, anything.

_There!_

It was a terrible idea to use Fleming’s Reach without spinning him up first, but pickings were slim, and terrible ideas were all he had left. “ _Might as well double down on them,_ ” he thought to himself as he teleported through the doorway, pulling himself out of the spell with an exertion of will that tore a scream from his throat. Weaving what magic he had left, he split it into two neat portions and made his peace with what was about to be one of the worst decisions of his short life.

Half went into a burst of raw force that rippled along the length of his staff as he slammed it into the creature's back. It was sloppy, and inefficient, and far from what he was used to, but it got the job done, partially uprooting the monster and sending it sprawling into the classroom beyond. 

The other went into the two spins of his staff he could pull off before his arm went numb up to the shoulder, ignoring Fleming’s worried protests as he Reached his way down the hallway and past the intersection. There wasn’t enough magic left for a graceful landing, and he hit the floor _hard_ , rolling past scorched and living tendrils alike, before coming to a rest just outside the Oracle classroom. 

“Gus?” came a worried voice from somewhere above him. It sounded like Skara, but that didn’t make any sense, because Skara’s ankles were hurt and she should be on the ground with him.

“Looks like he burned himself out.”

Another voice this time. Curt, almost mocking. Images of a three-eyed witch terrorizing Willow flickered through his mind. He tried to press his face into a scowl, but it probably ended up looking something like a grimace.

That same croaking echoed up the hallway behind them, and Gus groaned in response.

“Can’t this thing just give up?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Boscha replied, her voice suddenly closer before he felt an arm wrap around his shoulders and lift him up, “Pi- Skara, I could use some help here.”

“Right,” Skara responded from somewhere to his right, her own arm snaking around his shoulders from the other side. He couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up in his throat at the thought of all five feet of her trying to lift him.

“I _will_ leave you here,” she hissed, pulling him forward regardless.

“No you won’t,” Gus replied, “Because then you’d have to face Willow.”

The person to his left (was that Boscha or Skara?) tensed up, but the three of them kept stumbling forward, the croaking behind them getting closer and closer. They weren’t going to make it, he realized, and _that_ was a major bummer.

They’d made it to the doors, had them open even, but the thing was basically on top of them at this point, and there wasn’t much they could do to stop it. Gus closed his eyes, waiting for the crushing, burning end that never came. After a moment, he opened them, only to find that he’d somehow made it to the grass at the bottom of the stairs. Skara kneeled next to him, a stunned look on her face, and he forced himself to follow her gaze.

It was Willow, because of course it was.

She stood, resolute and unyielding, fully wrapped in living armor, two arms held firm against the creature’s side. The creature pushed back, its form squelching around her gauntleted hands, but still she held. Each tendril that lashed towards her was met with one of her own, tying them down and pulling them out of the fight. 

“Now, Em!” she screamed to nowhere in particular, and directly from that nowhere emerged a flock of dripping, nib-beaked crows whose screams drowned out all thought but this deep, primal _fear_.

They fell upon the tendrils that rooted the pitcher plant into the school’s flagstones, ripping and tearing into all that held it to the earth. And with one mighty heave, Willow took all the force it brought against her and flipped it over her shoulders, tearing it free. It soared down the stairs behind her, hanging weightless in the air for a few, transient moments. 

Then fire ripped into it from somewhere Gus’ limited field of view couldn’t reach, igniting the gases that had undoubtedly built up inside of it, and it exploded with enough force that it may as well have been struck by lightning.

Silence reigned for a long while, though whether it was just to lend contrast to the thunder that had torn through a moment before was anyone’s guess. Gus let out a low whine as he pushed himself to his feet, coherent thought slowly returning as his eyes caught on his Bondmate. He managed a weak smile but was met only with a scowl. Confusion flared before he realized the gaze wasn’t directed at him, but someone behind him, and suddenly it all clicked.

_Thorns._

“What the _blessed hell_ are you doing here,” Willow positively spat at the witch in question.

Looks like he was going to die tonight after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After much ado, the second chapter is finally here. Turns out writing one big, long-form fic is quite a lot for me to handle, but I'm taking a break from that one for a couple of weeks, and I have no impulse control, so here. Also, if you're interested in the fic this is a branch off of, you can find that here;
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/27437167/chapters/67071757
> 
> We just hit a big milestone in the story over there, so now is a great time to jump in. Until next time!


	3. Hail to the King

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this ended up being longer than I expected. Writing machine goes brrrr. Anyways, I hope you enjoy. You'll see why I decided to put the notes at the front when you're done with the chapter. Wouldn't want to ruin the moment.
> 
> Still, if you're interested in more like this (though not exactly like this just yet), the fic it's a branch off of can be found here;  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/27437167/chapters/67071757

* * *

**alienation**

/,ālyəˈnāSH(ə)n/

_noun_

**\- the state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved.**

\- loss or lack of sympathy; estrangement.

* * *

**-The Bard-**

Skara fancied herself a poet, but there were times when she saw things that just robbed her of the ability to string words together completely. Three of the most powerful witches she’d ever met working together while barely speaking to utterly annihilate a monster the size of a troll and twice as ugly? Utterly fantastic, visionary even.

She’d appreciate it a lot more if her ankles weren’t still burning like hell, but at least Viney was some help on that front. Boscha’d managed to scrounge up a healing glyph searching through the teacher’s desk in the Oracle classroom (and hadn’t even bothered to entertain her protests on the matter when she applied it), but glyphs just didn’t compare to proper spellwork. Of course, all the healing magic in the world wouldn’t matter if two of those same three witches ended up killing each other and taking everyone in a hundred-foot radius with them.

_Would you look at that, Gus? Subconscious conversion. Who was better with this stuff now?_

In his defense, the illusionist in question was the furthest thing from being able to congratulate or (more likely) correct her. Boscha had been right; he’d burned himself out, and Skara knew from experience that he was barely going to be able to _stand_ for the next few hours, let alone fight.

The ground shook beneath her, drawing her attention back to the pair of them, to the vines ripping their way free of the earth that (save for one notable exception) weren’t actually out to dismember any of them this time. Boscha remained still, stoic even, but Skara knew her, and she especially knew that look on her face.

“ _I’m just here to help_ ,” is what Boscha should have said; is what any reasonable person would have started with, but her problem wasn’t so much that she _lacked reason_ as she tended to see competition in _everything_.

Grudgby games? Great time to be competitive. There was a reason they’d never lost a championship. Well, until they had, but that wasn’t a thought she cared to revisit.

Classes? Hey, maybe their fellow students weren’t fond of her, but Boscha had always been able to run circles around most of them if her teachers (or, more often, Skara herself) could phrase it as some sort of winners and losers scenario.

Talking to a witch for the first time in over two years after you spent most of the ones prior to that tormenting her? Definitely not the right time. And yet…

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Boscha scoffed, booking Skara’s stomach a first-class ticket to somewhere just north of the abyss. Sighing and ignoring Viney’s protests, she pushed herself to her feet. Pins and needles crackled up her legs, her ankles still faintly numb, but even that was a vast improvement. She got maybe half a step before a hand settled on her shoulder, and she turned to its source, finding herself face-to-face with Emira.

_Which was always an experience._

Even when she’d still been in school, Emira had been two years ahead of her, and it showed. They’d had plenty of opportunities to run across one another while she and Amity had still hung out, and each time she’d been struck by this _intensity_ that the elder Blight carried with her. It wasn’t brash and loud like Boscha’s (the same that spawned such lovely arguments as the one currently about to play out), or even the sort of scatter-minded brilliance that Gus was prone to. No, Emira just had this subtle sort of confidence - this constant invitation in her eye to please try and do anything other than what she asked you to.

So when her hand didn’t budge, and when Skara realized soon after that her fingers were tipped with wickedly sharp, metallic _claws_ , she decided to do as she asked.

“You don’t?” Willow asked, the question curling off into a chuckle that came out sharp and brittle; utterly devoid of humor.

“I don’t see what’s so funny, Park,” Boscha snarled back, drawing a groan from Skara as she _bared her fangs_ at the other witch. Silently, she passed a prayer on to the Titan. The alchemist was in _their_ hands now.

“Oh I don’t know,” Willow teased, still humorless, “maybe just the fact that the first time I laid you out didn’t seem to have any effect on your attitude.”

“What, you get one lucky hit in and I’m supposed to be afraid of you?”

“One? What, did I knock the numbers out of your head too? I seem to remember it being closer to six _lucky_ hits, though if you want to get specific, I guess we could count you hitting the floor as a seventh.”

Emira whistled long and low beside her, a faint chuckle passing her lips despite the scowl Viney tossed in her direction. Skara was with the beastkeeper on this one. She was leagues away from her sixth, but she didn’t need anything other than her usual five to let her know that both witches were pulling entirely too much magic for them to be anywhere near stealthy.

_Which was sort of important, considering they’d ended up on the bayward wing after all._

No big deal though, really. It wasn’t like they’d all agreed to avoid the bayward courtyard until they knew what they were dealing with. Wasn’t as if just on the other side of the treeline to their right were the greenhouses that were likely the _source_ of their problem. Oh no, it was a wonderful idea to get into an argument and draw enough magic to make the Titan blush.

“You’re not going to stop them?” She asked Emira instead, trying and failing to hide the annoyance in her tone. The older witch looked her over, this appraising look just behind her eyes, before stepping off to the side. 

“If you want to give it a shot,” she crooned, gesturing to them with one clawed hand.

Those same mocking eyes went wide, Skara flinching along with her as Gus unexpectedly pushed past them, leaving a flustered, thoroughly displeased Viney in his wake. He didn’t stride so much as stumble, and there was this lack of focus in his eyes that had nothing to do with his usual absentmindedness, but there was this _expression_ on his face that got to her. One she’d never seen before; that she was weirdly impressed with him for finally showing.

Gus was _pissed_.

“Are you serious right now,” he snapped, low and tense, though which of the two bickering witches he was referring to was anyone’s guess.

The effect, however, was immediate; every scrap of magic drawn up in the last minute dispersing as they seemed to finally remember their audience. She’d expected the look of shame from Willow - she was a functional, rational witch after all - but seeing the same expression plastered across Boscha’s face was enough to give her pause.

“What Boscha should have told you,” Gus began, tossing another scowl the alchemist’s way, “is that the reason she’s here is that someone’s been siphoning reagents from the potions labs.”

“And she knows that why?” Willow asked, suspicion plain in her tone.

“Gee, Willow, maybe because she’s a potions witch,” Gus replied sarcastically, earning another little thrill from Skara, “Are you really going to let _Boscha_ get the better of your common sense?”

“I’m still right here-” 

“Don’t get me started,” Gus snapped, turning fully around to face her, “You saved Skara, you helped us, that’s great. But witch-to-witch, we’re still not good. And you might not be able to tell, but I’m _really_ not in the mood to rebuild bridges right now.”

“That’s… fair,” Boscha conceded. Skara scanned the skies for angels. Certainly, the end-times were upon them.

“Well I’m glad you think so,” Gus replied, chuckling with genuine humor. As he did, he couldn’t help but hide the wince. The faint crackle of energy across his eyes that accompanied it.

“Gus, you don’t look so good,” Willow mused, pressing a bare hand to his forehead.

“Yeah, well to be honest I probably pushed it way too far.”

“He did,” Viney interjected, walking over to join them, “kid’s almost completely tapped.”

“Well, this places us all in a fine situation,” Emira quipped as she and Skara completed the circle, “One witch tapped, three more well on their way, _and_ we’ve managed to pick up a new recruit that somehow managed to make Willow _broiling_ Park lose her temper. I’ve gotta say, as far as operations go, this one’s anything but smooth.”

And just to punctuate her point, because the Titan challenges us all in their own special way, something _bloomed_ just at the edge of the courtyard. 

As if awakening from a long night’s rest, the flower rose to nearly Gus’ height before splitting apart into a vaguely humanoid form. Thin, elegant limbs unfolded themselves with a grace that immediately made Skara jealous. Titan, if she could move like that, she’d fill theaters every night. The petals near its head pulled back, revealing a faintly witch-like face, though far sharper even than Emira’s features. Its eyes (if you could even call the pair of pale white orbs that rested in its face eyes) trailed over each of them in turn.

“Solanum’s banner,” It called out suddenly, an odd lilting cadence to its voice, “laid low in its prime. By talons and nibs taken, hopes maligned. And thou, fair maiden,” it added, gesturing to Willow, “whose hands once drew life; thou becomest the reaper, weighed with crimes.”

“Is it… rhyming?” Boscha asked, disbelief evident in her voice. She’d (appropriately) directed it towards Skara, but she was just as confused as the rest of them. Still, as the bard turned the words over in her head, she couldn’t help the smile that crossed her face once realization reared its head.

“Close,” Skara corrected, stepping forward, “It’s not a true rhyme, but it’s speaking in iambic pentameter. You know,” she elaborated, taking in the owlish stares of her fellow witches, “ten beats to a line, alternating stress patterns… We talked about it in class.”

“You’re in Bard courses,” Gus responded, apparently having decided to not spare _her_ from his grumpy mood.

“We talked about this in our Literature of the Isles course,” she pushed back, “You know, the one we _all_ have or had to take to graduate.”

“Ah, well, you know,” Emira replied, not even pretending to be ashamed, “I’m more of an applied witch anyways. By all means, feel free to bard it up, Farah.”

“It’s Skara,” the witch in question huffed, turning to face the flower creature. It was waiting at least, rather than attacking them outright, so that was a start. “Let’s give it a shot,” she whispered more to herself than anyone else, “Hark, forest’s ward! What business have thou here?”

Skara pointedly ignored the laughter that bubbled up behind her the moment she’d said the word “hark.” The way it doubled when she stacked “thou” on top of it. They could get over themselves. It’s not like _they_ knew how to talk to this thing. Speaking of which…

“Aye, my lady,” the flower/person thing responded, “thy quick tongue is noted. Thou must pass from these lands, n’er returning. By order of mine king, this must be done.”

“With haste must we pass, good knight of the weald?” Skara asked, subconsciously trying to replicate the way the creature’s voice seemed to drift with the wind.

“Indeed, my lady, these lands shall be ours, for from the ground we have come, and all that it touches shall pass to us as our right.”

“What’s he saying?” Emira asked, crouching slightly to be at eye-level with her. Skara would have preferred it if she just slapped her instead.

“He’s saying that the land is theirs and that it’s their right to claim it,” she replied with a huff.

“On whose authority?” Emira asked her, expression suddenly stormy.

“Would you like me to ask?” Skara snarked.

She decided to take the witch’s piercing glare as an affirmative.

“Alright,” Skara mused, turning from the group and racking her brain for the right way to phrase things, “Sir knight, from thine lands we shall soon pass on, but my companion would ask a question. On whose authority are we dismissed?”

“By will of his royal highness, the king, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Skara responded, “how foolish of me to ask. But this king you already named, and yet his name is absent from our tongues and minds.”

_Oof, that last one had been a stretch._

“Our king needs not a name!” the creature responded, and Skara settled in for the inevitable monologue that would follow the break in the pattern. “He pulled us from the earth and filled our eyes with light. Draws seeds up to sprouts, and sprouts up to mighty oaks. Casts all aspersions from the Court of Luminous Bulbs. Delights in pleasures great and small, pouring out his o’erflowing cup for all to drink from as they will. Never has a more just king ruled, nor have so few contested his reign. It is clear to all that he was meant to rule, was made for it exclusively, and so it shall be forever.”

_Lay it on a bit thicker, bud._

“And what might I call thee, Knight of the Bulb?”

“I am called Constantius, Hand of the King, executor of his will and enemy of all who would blaspheme in raising a hand against his majesty.”

“Do we have to use the whole title?” Willow whispered from somewhere behind her, Viney making a noncommittal noise in response.

“Sir Constantius, might I have a moment?” Skara asked, testing the waters. He’d broken the pattern first, so she was fairly sure…

“You may indeed, but act quickly, my lady,” Constantius responded, “Be warned, a moment for thee is a great deal of time for myself, and mine patience, though great, is finite.”

There was hardly enough time to unpack all of that, but Skara pushed through regardless, turning to her companions and presenting them with the most definite of gestures; a shrug. She was just the translator; better to leave the planning to folks who were built for that sort of thing.

Emira settled back on her heels, eyes firmly fixed on the ground before she finally let out a long sigh. “Suppose we should try and meet this king of theirs,” she added a moment after, the uncertainty in her voice surprisingly familiar.

“With Gus the way he is?” Willow asked, concern bared.

“Gee, thanks Willow,” Gus snarked, and Skara couldn’t help but laugh at the uncharacteristic gesture.

“You know what I mean.”

“You can’t help him through burnout, love?” Emira asked, turning to Viney.

“Not here; not with what I have on hand,” she responded, shrugging, “I figured it would just be some rogue plants. Never thought someone would completely burn themselves out.”

“Well, why don’t we just fly Gus back into town?” Skara asked, trying to be helpful, “He could crash at someone’s place until this all blows over.”

“I am right here,” Gus added, voice cast to the void.

“What, and then not have any way to get everyone out safely?” Willow asked, shaking her head, “Not a great idea.”

“Well, I’d love to see you come up with something better,” Skara replied, feeling herself get heated.

Wait, why was she _this_ mad at Willow?

“I have a vial of Mana,” Boscha piped up, her voice so small Skara almost didn’t hear her.

The circle went silent, all eyes focused on the alchemists who’d stepped onto center stage.

“You _what_?” Skara asked, shifting into her ‘chastising younger siblings’ tone of voice.

“We had to make it for our potions midterm!” Boscha clarified, though somehow she suspected she wasn’t getting the full truth, “I don’t just have it,” she added (unconvincingly). 

“They don’t make you get rid of it after?” Emira asked, seemingly genuinely curious.

“Well, we’re supposed to,” Boscha admitted, looking anywhere but at Skara, “but I figured it might come in handy.”

“Boscha,” Skara warned, “that’s extremely illegal.”

“Good work,” Emira quipped.

“Typical,” Willow scoffed at precisely the same time.

“You want to fucking go, Park?” Boscha snapped, finding her outlet.

“Name a time and place, Stryder!” Willow shouted back, meeting her in kind.

“Right here, right now-”

“Can you both shut up?” Gus interrupted, fully stepping between them this time and turning to the alchemist, “Boscha, pass it over.”

“Gus, you don’t have to-” Skara began.

“No,” Gus replied, cutting her off, “it makes the most sense; this is just how it breaks down.” He turned back to Boscha, frowning in concentration for a moment, “Mana’s not harmful right? Or addictive?”

“Only after repeated use,” Boscha reassured him, actually sounding… sincere?

“Right, so I’ll take most of it and leave some for you, Emira.”

“Why some for me?”

“You’re the second lowest out of all of us here.”

“What, you go and unlock your sixth in your spare time?”

“No, not quite yet,” Gus admitted, chuckling knowingly, “but I figure that thing you do with the ink-crows is a second-degree binding, third at least?”

“Yeah,” Emira confirmed, caught off guard, “it’s a series of second-degree bindings subsumed into a lattice of third degrees-”

“And bound to your palisman?” Gus guessed, nodding along with Emira’s stunned confirmation.

“How did you-”

“They don’t just hand staves out to anyone,” Willow joked, “regardless of what you and Edric having yours might suggest.”

“I liked you a lot better when you didn’t talk as much,” Emira teased back, earning a laugh out of Boscha that didn’t even come close to pretending to be a cough.

“Well then?” Gus asked expectantly, a hand outstretched to Boscha. Sighing, Boscha reached into her coat, pulling a finger-sized vial of scintillating blue liquid from within. As she passed it over, her two lower eyes stayed locked firmly on Gus, a question hidden behind them, but it was her third that had Skara’s focus.

More specifically, how it had never once looked at anyone other than her since she’d snapped at the witch.

“Bottoms up,” Gus quipped with faux-cheeriness, downing two-thirds of the vial before passing it to Emira, who tossed hers back without reaction as Gus coughed and hacked his way through the experience. Willow patted his back gently, Skara settling for tossing him a sympathetic glance.

“We ready?” Emira asked, coughing ever so slightly on the last syllable.

“As we’ll ever be,” Viney muttered, and the rest of them nodded in agreement. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

_Now Skara just had to convince him to take them there..._

**-The Illusionist-**

After a long sequence of (assumedly) convincing flatteries out of Skara, the flower-knight agreed to lead them to “his royal majesty” for “an audience and subsequent judgment.” Which was great, really; nothing like being granted an audience with the king of plants. Not for the first time that night, Gus found his body groaning in protest as he put one foot in front of the other. 

“How’re you doing,” Willow asked from beside him, a flash of concern passing along their Bond. He met it with reassurance, but even that was feebler than he’d expected.

“You know me,” he replied with a tense grin, “always pushing things just a bit too far. I’ll be fine, though.”

“How does it feel?”

“Burning out? You’ve done it before-”

“No,” she interrupted, “the Mana.”

_Ah, the Mana._

How to describe it? If she’d asked, Gus could’ve given her its alchemical makeup. He wasn’t a potions witch by any stretch of the imagination, but the HAS had left no stone unturned when it came to unraveling the mysteries of the humans’ “electricity.” The reasoning had been sound at least - they’d needed more power, and they didn’t want to risk anyone burning themselves out while exposed to literal lightning. 

After all, Mana was just artificial bile. Maybe a pale imitation of the original, but the process kicked off in the body whipped up enough raw material to bring a witch back to full capacity. Albeit, at the cost of a good third of their fluids - blood, spit, acid and all.

_In other words, not a very pleasant experience._

“It’s not great,” he admitted past painfully dry lips, “but it’s a whole lot better than being defenseless out here. Speaking of which,” he added, glancing at their surroundings, “any reason why what should be a two-minute walk is taking us closer to ten?”

“Something’s wrong with the forest,” Willow replied, almost over-eager to leave the previous conversation behind, “There’s a sort of lingering magic here - the kind of thing that would usually only crop up after a few years of spellwork - but somehow it’s settled over the entire region.”

“Meaning?” Gus prompted, nudging her along.

“Whoever’s behind this magic could have near-absolute control over their ‘domain,’ so to speak.”

“So this king-” Gus began.

“Is no joke,” Willow concluded, thin vines forming and snapping between gauntleted fingers, “We may need a quick getaway,” she added with a sly grin. Behind it, she pushed something down, just below the surface of their Bond, and Gus chose to leave it.

_For the moment, at least._

“Hey, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s running away. I’ve got us covered.”

Their eyes didn’t meet, but something else held firm between them. Trust, respect, comfort, even, given form and forged true. Words weren’t necessary, but they spoke them anyway.

“If nothing else,” Willow mused.

“We have each other,” Gus finished with his first genuine grin in a while. 

_And that would have to be enough._

~---~

“-Thou art fortunate indeed, to be granted such an honor by my king, for his perpetual labor is so rarely marked by moments of rest. That he would give one such moment to you-”

On second thought, Gus _was_ familiar with the way the creature was speaking. He’d specifically screened it out, in fact. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve petitioned out of the Literature course entirely, but that had been last year, and last year he had been a fool.

That, of course, drew his thoughts to Skara, who was caught up in walking the careful line between needling Boscha and setting her off completely. He was trying his best to be impartial about the witch, she _had_ gotten them out of a tight spot after all, but the moment she’d seen Willow, it had been right back to good old “three-eyed menace.” That combined with the near-constant cascade of negative emotions along the Bond whenever Willow so much as looked at the alchemist was enough to put any thoughts of reconciliation well away from today’s agenda.

But apparently, getting drawn along to a fortress made the cut.

Because really, that was the only way to describe the structure that was revealed to them as they turned the last bend of the impossibly long, winding path through the forest. 

Once, the greenhouses had been a loose square of eight glass buildings, but they’d since been overgrown and converted by thick, trunk-like vines into a formidable outer wall. Towers that seemed some strange mix of plant and fungus hung just below the tree line of the clearing where they sat, though even _those_ trees seemed taller than they had before, their eaves darker and more dense. The whole place held an air of expectation, as if holding its breath for some event that had not yet come to pass.

Or, well it hadn’t until they walked into the clearing. 

The space between two of the greenhouses wasn’t so much a gate as an aperture, and when it opened as they walked towards it, the sound it made was this strange mix of rasping and clattering that set Gus’ teeth buzzing.

The knight - Constantius, he reminded himself - drew to a full stop, and the witches he’d been guiding fell in behind them. Willow had kept her armor up, save for the helmet, but he caught the edges of it growing over her neck out of the corner of his eye. Viney’s griffin had stayed behind at the knight’s insistence, but he knew she could call him to her side in an instant so long as she had her staff.

All of them could summon magic to their fingertips for that matter. He had a _staff_ , for the Titan’s sake. What could these plant things possibly throw at them that they weren’t prepared for?

“Stand at attention, brave knights of the Bulb!” a shrill, familiar voice called from a throne slowly being carried out of the gate. Its owner, a diminutive wolf-like demon with a skull fused to his head and a single broken horn, glared down at them imperiously. “Sully not your words, but rather- Oh, wait, that won’t work. Hold on.”

“King?” Willow gasped, incredulous, at precisely the same moment Emira _snarled_ his name with far less affection, a pair of daggers suddenly appearing in her hands. Two of the petal knights produced their own weapons, also from seemingly nowhere, pressing a pair of whip-thin crystalline swords to her neck. 

“Halt! Halt, my knights!” King squealed, scrambling down from his chair and earning a gasp from all plants assembled. “Emira, Willow, hey, hold on a minute,” he stuttered, “there’s no need for violence.”

“Fat chance of that,” Emira replied, glaring at one of the nearby petal knights, something - no, many _somethings_ \- beginning to move and shift under her coat. Beside her, Willow’s helm closed with a dull thud, green fire flaring to life in the eye-slits.

“I demand you cease this,” King shouted, the knights immediately complying and lowering their swords. “There,” he added as an aside to the assembled witches, “that enough to convince you?”

“You earned yourself five seconds,” Emira stated flatly, the fabric of her coat ceasing its cawing, “Start talking.”

“Okay,” King replied, “alright, sounds good, but hear me out. Why don’t we have this conversation over dinner?”

“Not interested,” Emira gritted out past her bared fangs.

“Fair,” King conceded, “but counterpoint?”

Flowers burst up between them before any of them possibly could have reacted. Well, any of them except for one. Boscha managed to drill a burning, fist-sized hole through one of the knights before three more grappled her, but the rest of them didn’t even have the time to recognize what was happening before they were restrained.

“I wasn’t asking,” the demon singsonged as he waddled his way back through the gate. “Knights, please escort our honored guests into the great hall. The feast of our victory is upon us!”

~---~

As far as dinners in the Isles went, sharing a meal with a bunch of sapient plants wasn’t the strangest experience he’d ever had, but Gus had to admit that the water and nectar-based fare was… unusual, to say the least.

Indeed, only King seemed to be worthy of anything besides the glorified dirt-smoothies the rest of them had been presented with. He presided over his meal - a plate of gristlehorn ribs “nobly sequestered” from a butcher at the edge of town - as surely as he presided over the rest of them from the seat of his throne.

The seat of his power sat at the far end of the open garden that had once filled the space between the greenhouses. To Gus’ surprise, none of the planters had been broken or moved, though a great deal of the things that normally grew in them were currently walking around the “throne room,” so maybe this was where they lived?

They sat just before the throne, in a position Constantius insisted was one of great honor, though Gus imagined if he’d been told to stand in the king’s latrine, he’d also consider that to be a “position of great honor,” so his word didn’t count for much. Still, he’d warmed up to most of them, going so far as to field Skara’s million and one questions about the band that was playing at the center of the room.

“And you said the grass is specially grown to act as strings?” 

“Oh yes, my lady,” the petal knight responded, “though such careful growing must take place over many minutes in order to properly imbue the magic.”

“Constantius,” she asked, pausing for a moment, “you keep mentioning minutes and hours as great deals of time. If it’s not too much for me to ask, how long do your people live?”

“Oh, it is a grave question that thou ask,” Constantius responded mournfully, “though ye are an honored guest of our king, and so I am compelled to answer. We of the Knights of the Bulb are the eldest of our kind, but we are only a few weeks old, and yet we feel our wilting on the near horizon.”

“Wait, a few weeks?” Willow asked, looking up from her conversation with Emira. They’d been like that for half an hour already, heads close and locked in some sort of heated discussion. He’d picked out a few words here and there, hoping he was the only one, because there were really only so many ways you could interpret “regicide.”

“Aye, massacrist,” the knight responded, defaulting back to his title for her, “We dwelt in terror of thine scythe for three long weeks, huddling in the cracks and crannies of thine fragile crystalline house before our king found us, terrified, and led us into the light.”

Seeming to think that was the end of the matter, Constantius gave her a stiff bow, and then turned back to Skara; that apparently being the equivalent of a rude gesture for the creature.

“You asked of the nature of our craft, weaver of lies?” He asked, eyes suddenly trained directly on Gus.

“Uh yeah,” Gus admitted, “though it seemed like you were ignoring me, so I didn’t bother pressing the issue.” He’d also been the victim of a stiff bow just a few minutes prior, but if minutes were really hours to these people, chances are the knight had experienced some long redemption arc in the time it’d taken Gus to doze in and out of the feast a half-dozen times.

“I was ignoring thee,” the knight admitted, “but some time has passed, and I’ve decided that what actions thou took were coerced by thine companions.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you,” Gus monotoned.

“Indeed, I very much doubt thee would have the backbone to commit such acts thyself.”

Skara snorted water up her nose, earning an alarmed look from the knight, but quickly waved him away, gesturing him back towards Gus.

“Ask thine questions then, spineless one.”

Skara choked again, and Gus pointedly ignored her as he locked eyes with the knight. Or tried to, at least, the Mana in his system only partially responsible. There was something wrong with this place, this fortress. That same sense of lingering magic that Willow had mentioned, now ramped up to an intensity that muddled his mind and dulled his senses.

“I was curious about this magic you keep mentioning,” Gus replied, pushing through the fogginess, “As far as I can tell, none of you are burning bile, which really has me confused as to how you can imbue things with magic.”

“Well, weaver of lies-”

“Really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“It’s actually quite simple,” he continued, ignoring the interruption, “we pull our magic from the-”

He cut off suddenly, his eyes flashing to the band. They’d switched to another song - something slow and mournful, and a definite departure from what they’d played previously. But that wasn’t what drew Gus’ attention.

No, that had to be the fissure that split part of the courtyard in two, the petal knights that poured out of it, dressed not in the black and white petals of the knights around them, but in strange lurid hues of purple and red. The courtyard froze for a moment, the swelling tone of the band echoing past now-quiet tables, before descending into utter chaos.

Knights on both sides unsheathed their swords, falling upon one another like rivaling tides, whispering blades of crystal cutting clean through forms that bore no armor. One of the inner greenhouse walls still made of glass shattered as another massive pitcher-plant creature tore its way into the courtyard, lashing indiscriminately with acid-soaked tendrils.

Gus felt a moment of indecision before something else washed through him - something instinctual and animalistic. The “Porter Instinct,” as his dad liked to call it.

_When the going gets tough, run like hell._

His eyes flashed to his staff, stacked with Viney’s and Emira’s just at the base of King’s throne. If he could just get free of his bindings-

Crystal flashed in the moonlight, and the tightly woven vines that had wrapped his hands fell away, the raw skin of his wrists stinging in the cool night air. Grey eyes met pale white orbs that somehow held a depth of emotion beyond anything he’d imagine. Guilt, grief, doubt, betrayal, they all flashed across Constantius’ features, and as he held the blade at his side, Gus imagined for a moment that he was considering whether or not to strike him down.

“Go,” he whispered instead, “take the king with thee. Ensure that all we have built does not fall to ruin. With this, I charge thee, witchling. Grow the spine you lack.”

Four more flickering swipes of his blade and Gus found himself no longer alone in his freedom. As they turned to face the knight, the awful slaughter behind him, he nodded once, and then strode forward, raising his voice as he went.

“Forward, my knights,” he called into the face of doom, “forward unto ruin! Lay thine blades to these treasonous scoundrels. Remember that though thine bodies might yet fail, thine noble oaths and deeds are eternal! For honor, for justice, and for the king!”

“Constantius!” King called from his throne, giving the knight pause as he turned to face the regent scrabbling his way down the dais. Far above, Gus heard the keening screech of a griffin.

“Go, my king,” Constantius insisted, somehow audible above the din of battle, “and carry our hope with you. Let us fall upon the blade in your stead. We are, each of us, grown for a reason. Let this noble stand be our final purpose.”

“Your bravery will not be forgotten,” King replied, wrapping the knight’s arm in both of his tiny hands. “I will remember this forever.”

“So long as you live, our people win this day, my king.”

“King, we need to go,” Emira insisted, coat buffeted by the wind of Lowell’s descent into the courtyard. All around them, knights and monsters alike fought and fell, stood triumphant, and were cut down in an instant. Still, the band played. Still, the music swelled over the courtyard. Even though the players themselves had long since been taken by one blade or another.

“Till next we meet,” Constantius called to them as Willow pulled the grasping demon away, “above ground or below.”

And then he was gone, tearing into the crowd like an arrow loosed, quickly lost in the press of bodies, the rising dust of broken earth and lingering spores. The last Gus ever saw of him was a flash of light, a blade raised, and a body felled, though whether it was his or another was a question without an answer.

“Gus!” Willow called to him, pulling him from the reverie. She’d just finished passing a vine-wrapped, struggling King up to Viney, her hand outstretched to him. He nodded in turn, bringing his hands together and summoning his staff between them. Setting it spinning as he backed towards her, fog billowed forth from the cerulean circle that sprung up before him. With another burst of power, he added ink to the mix, and when his back hit the griffin’s flank and a hand tangled in his cloak, pulling him aboard, he flared his power a third and final time.

Not a moment too soon, because when dripping tendrils whipped out of the fog below, they met only a flock of birds, each solid only for the transient moment when they marked the boundary between death and salvation. Moonlight caught strangely on a point just ahead of him, and Gus had only a moment to acknowledge the crystal blade launched directly towards him before a burning sphere rocketed from somewhere behind him and caught the blade on its flat. It traced a line along his cheek before whistling off into the darkness, vanishing into the night.

He turned to Boscha (because who else could make that kind of shot?) and nodded his appreciation. She seemed surprised for a moment, but nodded back, gesturing to the bard at her side, who carefully laid down her instrument. He’d thought it had been a quick shot, even for her.

And then Willow was next to him, a hand pressed to his cheek. To the blood that welled beneath. Words weren’t necessary, but they spoke them anyway. Just to let each other know they were alive; that they’d made it through hell yet again.

“If nothing else,” Willow whispered.

“We have each other,” Gus responded, pressing a shaking hand to hers in solidarity.

And as they flew off into the night, only one thought passed through their minds.

_What now?_

**-The Warden-**

Nights like tonight made Willow glad she’d spent so much time perfecting her scowl. Between the demon who’d nearly gotten her killed and the witch who’d made her life a living hell for years, she had plenty of options. There was really only one thing keeping her from laying into either of them, and that was Gus. She’d put him through enough already - the last thing she’d want to add to that was a flood of negative emotions.

And yet, despite that, negativity seemed to be today’s special.

They’d made it back to Emira’s apartment, only to discover that the other half of the old dynamic duo was nowhere to be found. Apparently, he’d actually done what he was supposed to for once, though the older witch had seemed more than a little suspicious about that fact. She’d since contented herself with forcing everyone who could to drink something, Gus especially - a gesture she’d find the time to be properly grateful for later. Now was the time for action.

“We need a plan,” Willow insisted, her words hanging heavy in the air.

“You saw that place,” Skara responded, looking up from where she’d been methodically tuning her instruments, “the sheer number of things that could tear us apart inside it; what are the five of us supposed to do against those kinds of odds?”

“The six of us!” King called from his bindings in the corner.

“No,” the witches responded in unison.

“I want to help!”

“You’ve done quite enough,” Emira snarled at him, fangs bared, “You’re lucky Eda isn’t in town, otherwise I would’ve dropped you off on the porch with a note and a few recommendations.”

“Oh,” King groaned back, apparently unintimidated by the witch, “you think you’re so scary just because you’re the Roo-”

His voice cut off sharply despite his jaw still moving, the remnants of an indigo circle between her fingers the only sign of Emira’s muffling spell. Willow had heard of stealthy casting, but seeing it in action was totally different. She made a mental note not to take her eyes off the witch if they made it through all this.

“Please, continue,” Emira insisted, sitting back in her chair.

“Like I said, we need a plan, and I’m open to any advice.”

“We torch the place,” Boscha suggested, deadly serious, “top to bottom, burn them out by the root.”

“That’s-” Skara began, pulling back to look at the witch beside her in shock.

“Awful,” Willow finished, glaring daggers at the alchemist.

“An absolutely terrible idea,” Emira amended, joining in.

“Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Viney conceded with a sigh, earning a shove and a scowl from her partner.

“What?” the beastkeeper protested, “My experience starts and ends at things with flesh and blood. Way I see it, there ain’t much any of us have that can put a real dent in those things _other_ than fire.”

“Maybe I’m missing something here,” Skara interjected, “but don’t you think that if we’re out of our depths we should, oh, I don’t know, _call the Peacekeepers_?”

“Doesn’t seem like the best idea,” Gus groaned, removing the wet washcloth from his eyes.

“Why not?” Skara asked, incredulous.

“Because that’ll be the end, won’t it,” Emira mused, turning to King, another quick gesture dismissing the spell.

“Won’t it, King?” she asked again, voice eerily even.

“Yes,” he admitted, looking ashamed for the first time tonight.

“Wait, what?” Skara asked, the picture of the confusion that Willow felt.

“The rest of you wouldn’t have noticed it,” Emira began, voice still low and even, “but I had my sixth up the entire time we were in there. What we saw? Not even a tenth of what they’ve got growing, gestating just beneath the surface. I’m assuming that was the contingency?” she asked, eyes still firmly locked on the demon.

“Can’t build an empire without an army,” he responded ruefully.

“I’ll admit, I always thought the delusions of grandeur were just that - delusions - but you’ve really proven me wrong with this attempted coup.”

That tone made her wonder (not for the first time) what _exactly_ the eldest Blight had gone through as a child. Amity could be dark, Edric too when the mood took him, but there was something different about Emira. Something sharp and keen lurked just below the surface. If Willow hadn’t seen her in action, didn’t know the good heart that lurked even deeper, she would’ve been terrified of the witch. The fact that King _wasn’t_ spoke more volumes than he realized.

“I wasn’t going to hurt anyone,” King insisted.

“Oh no, you were just going to conquer the Isles,” Emira snarked back, “press us all into servitude, and reign for a thousand years, right?”

“I would have been a benevolent ruler.”

“And what about when you would have lost your army after the first battle?” Boscha asked, surprising them all by joining in.

“What do you mean, ‘lost my army after the first battle?’” King asked suspiciously, having the audacity to sound _offended_ at the implication.

“Three-eyes is right; you’ve got a weakness, and a big one at that,” Emira quipped, shaking her head, disappointed like a professor might be in a student who was so close to the answer but couldn’t quite reach it.

“Oh yeah, what might that be?”

“Fire,” Emira replied, calling a crackling, indigo gout of the stuff to her hands. She turned it in her hands as she spoke, casting her features into sharp relief. “Even a specialist like me can still call up the stuff. Just about every witch can. It’s a part of us; a primitive and carnal aspect of our souls. Why do you think it’s one of the easiest spells to draw power for? Bile _burns_.”

“So yeah,” she quipped, dismissing the flame with a flourish, “you probably wouldn’t have made it through the first night. But that was when you were in charge. I know you, King. You want power, respect, glory, but you don’t really want to hurt anyone to get it. But you just had to go and get yourself deposed…”

She trailed off, letting the implication hang in the air. As realization dawned, Willow felt her heart skip a beat.

“They’ve got no direction,” Viney mused, voicing her thoughts before she could properly string them together.

“Oh, they’ve got direction alright; probably a brand new ruler too,” Emira corrected, “Eager to make his mark on the world. And the only witches they’ve interacted with-”

“Are us,” Gus continued, “who’ve spent the better part of the night wiping them out one-by-one.”

“Exactly,” Emira replied, grin gone wolfish. 

“So that means we can’t call the Peacekeepers why, exactly?” Skara asked, doubling down on her point. It was a good one really, were it not for the fact that-

“They’re holding us hostage, and they don’t even know it,” Boscha piped up, flagging when all eyes turned to her. Willow hated that she actually agreed with the witch on something.

“Right you are, Goshok,” Emira quipped, earning a scowl from the alchemist.

“It’s Boscha.”

“Whatever,” Emira replied, turning to face the rest of the room. With a flick of her wrist, her staff appeared out of whatever pocket realm she kept it in, and with another she set it twirling. Willow felt Gus tense beside her, saw Emira’s eyes flick to his exhausted form, and heard the faint chuckle that passed her lips.

“Not a chance kid,” she joked, not quite managing to hide the warmth in her tone, “you sit this one out and let a professional show you how it’s done.”

Willow’s eyes caught on the point of inky darkness that emerged at the center of the room, undulating and flashing with barely contained magicks. Shaking her head, a fond, tired smile on her face, Viney tugged the coffee table to rest just under it before pulling a well-worn scroll from off of one of the nearby shelves. She unrolled it with a flourish, stepping back and pressing a quick kiss to Emira’s cheek that earned her a jaunty grin and a quip Willow couldn’t make out. 

The eldest Blight raised her free hand, her eyes flaring with magic, and a snap of her fingers sent the drop careening toward the parchment below.

Ink splashed at the point of impact, then held in place, caught for a moment in time. With the barest shift in the arc of her staff, Emira sent it cascading across the page, her magic holding it to razor-thin lines. As they watched, the wilds around Bonesborough came into relief, then into sharper detail, and finally to near realism. 

“Emira,” Gus whispered, utterly enraptured by the display, “that’s-”

“Incredible?” she asked, “Astounding even? I’ll admit; I’m mostly doing it to impress her,” she added with a grin, tossing a glance Viney’s way.

“It’s working,” the beastkeeper replied in a tone that was not _at all_ helpful.

“Can we focus please?” Willow snapped, drawing their attention back to the steadily expanding map.

“Killjoy,” Emira teased back.

“Sybarite,” the plant witch replied, earning a mystified look from everyone _except_ Skara, who burst out laughing.

“Where’d you even learn a word like that?” Emira asked her, scowling.

“Your sister, actually,” Willow replied, meeting it with a grin, “she’s been on the search for ones to properly describe you.”

“Me or someone else?” Emira cut back, her tone suggestive, and the two couldn’t help but laugh together.

“Speaking of Amity,” Skara cut in, “any reason why _she’s_ not here?”

“She’s busy,” Viney and Emira responded at the exact same time.

“Ok… What about Luz? Wouldn’t mind some glyphs on our side. Can’t beat her for destructive potent-”

“Also busy,” Willow interjected, earning a scowl from Boscha that she met in kind.

“Right,” Skara replied, shaking her head, “not like this is important or anything. Plan away, oh fearless leader!”

“Nice reference,” Emira quipped in passing as she moved to stand over the map, one hand set at either end of the table as she lowered herself to sit beside it. “So here’s the situation,” she began, gesturing to the overgrown section of the map that still set a weight in Willow’s gut, “The greenhouses are the center of their operation, but there are caverns that stretch out beneath.”

“The grottoes,” Willow whispered in horror. The samples down there were precious, irreplaceable even. If something were to happen to them, she’d be hunted by every green witch in the Isles.

“Oh, you mean the incubator?” King asked from the corner, reveling in the attention that suddenly turned to him.

“The _what_?” Willow asked, voice dangerously low. 

“Beats me,” the demon replied, totally oblivious, “but when we first broke in, the knights got all quiet. Said they’d found a ‘holy place’ or something. It stuck with me because they refused to convert anything in them other than this big mushroom that was down there.”

He jumped as Willow closed her hand, drawing her vines (and the demon wrapped in them) to her side in an instant.

“What did it look like?” she asked him, each word deliberate, carefully chosen so as not to send her completely over the edge.

“Willow?”

“Answer me, King,” she demanded, ignoring Gus’ worried tone, “what did it look like?”

“Like a big, purple cloak with all these dangly silver bits,” he squeaked back, head drawing back on his shoulders. Willow fell back, stunned, thoughts fleeing before they could take hold.

_They wouldn’t; they couldn’t. How would they know? Who had told them? What was actually happening here?_

“Willow?” 

It was a different voice this time, even and clear, marked by an edge that could cut or excise in equal measure. _Emira._

“They went for the _Cordyceps silvestris_ ,” she whispered in response, feeling the witch tense up beside her.

“Why the _hell_ was that below a school?” Emira whispered back, voice low enough that Willow doubted anyone else in the room heard her.

“Why is Grometheus below the school?” Willow asked in turn, already knowing the answer.

“The wards,” Emira replied, realization and horror dawning in equal measure across her features.

“Which were deactivated when the doors were willingly opened by a student.”

“We’ve been played,” Emira breathed, sitting back on her heels.

“Would either of you mind clueing us in,” Skara called from over on the couch, her face falling as she saw the look on Willow’s own.

She couldn’t help it; couldn’t even pretend that the emotion squeezing her chest wasn’t a deep, bone-chilling terror. Hell, even _Gus_ shivered, and he had no clue what was eating at her.

_Cordyceps silvestris_ , the only fungus of its kind. Not even a species really, but they’d given it a name anyways. That was one of the few ways you could trap a thing like that. Sure, it was _technically_ a corpse, but outsiders of that ilk tended to treat death like a minor inconvenience unless you made damned sure to keep them _convinced_ they were dead. No, the mycelial growth that King had referred to as a “mushroom” was anything but, and knowing that it was somehow at the center of all of this made every piece fall into place.

Ingredients missing, the knowledge of the arcane required to pull something like this off, hell, even the way the flower knights _spoke_ \- it all made perfect sense. Awful, terrible, crystal-clear sense. It had all been orchestrated by one entity, one power. One mind, alien and primal.

Midhir, bastard child of Oberon and Mab, who’d once attempted to make the Isles a domain of his own.

Midhir, a Prince of the Hunt, entombed in a prison of rot and left to be forgotten save for those select few who knew his secret.

_Midhir, one of the Fae._


	4. Ballroom Blitz

* * *

**her·ald**

/ˈherəld/

_ noun _

\- an official messenger bringing news.

**\- a person or thing viewed as a sign that something is about to happen.**

* * *

**-The Warden-**

_ Making  _ the plan turned out to be the easiest part of the endeavor. Everything after went about as well as could be expected; which is to say, thorns caught skin the moment they set it into motion.

“You’re sure this is the best way to do things?” Skara asked her as the two of them walked through the forest, worry writ plain on her features. Willow had appreciated her willingness to help, to throw herself into the fray, but once they’d started hammering out details, things had gotten… complicated.

“Honestly, no,” she found herself admitting, meeting the bard’s gaze dead-on, “but I’m all ears if you’ve got a better one.”

She didn’t, judging by the way she turned back to the woods, eyes catching on the slight movements that clued her in to the truth that Willow realized the moment they’d set foot back in the wilds. There was no opportunity for stealth anymore.

_ But that wasn’t the plan, was it? _

No, they’d sat down, and they schemed, and Willow did her best not to even look at the alchemist that became far more animated at the prospect of a fight, a contest. At the opportunity to test herself against something that she didn’t have to worry about holding back against.

And regardless of how many pointed looks Gus tossed her way, she absolutely refused to acknowledge how the same could be said of  _ her _ .

Granted,  _ Boscha  _ had reason to be excited. Like most good plans, theirs started with a bang. She’d even taken the fact that the twins were sitting on a borderline illegal stockpile of reagents in her stride. And the moment they’d asked her to whip up something that could, as Emira put it, “get the attention of half the Isles,” she’d gotten this half-smile on her face that had set Willow’s veins alternating between ice and fire.

But she pushed her protests down, because they had one shot at this, and she wasn’t going to let some childish grudge hold the rest of them back.

“ _Just the one,_ ” as Emira had stressed again and again.

One chance, one opportunity to cut the evil out at its roots. To stop an outsider that their (unarguably more powerful) ancestors had fought for  _ years  _ to wear down to a point where he could be stopped and sealed away in a tomb of rot to be forgotten. Their only solace that the magic had apparently worked  _ this  _ long, and that if it had, he wouldn’t be able to just walk out at full power so soon after being freed. To that point, there was some twisted comfort.

_ If he had, they’d likely already be dead. _

Thunder multiplied a dozen times over tore all thought, all contemplation from Willow’s mind, and she forced away the tears that threatened to spill at the sight of what she knew lay around the next bend.

Still, her breath caught at the sight of it. At the gaping hole between two greenhouses, where the gate had once stood. At the smoke that curled up from tongues of scarlet fire that licked across the arboreal walls that had once proved impenetrable. At the sudden appearance of Gus beside her, hand-in-hand with the alchemist responsible for the devastation - her vile work done.

And then the ground ahead of them tore open, and there was no longer any time for thought, for regret or mourning. She was in the thick of it - surrounded on all sides by a menagerie of plants-turned-monsters that one side of her brain could identify as easily as breathing and the other could arrange the sequence of blows necessary to reduce them to so much compost. Each blow tore the slightest bit more at the careful seam that had long divided them. That had kept them from outweighing each other; from competing for dominance in her mind. 

It was damnation, plain and simple. Everything she’d worked for, all of the effort she’d put into her craft, only for it to be thrown back in her face as something to be annihilated by her own two hands. And to top it all off, she was charging into it next to her Bondmate and two witches who’d tormented her for the better part of her life.

The ground beneath them  _ rippled _ , earth and stone turned to so much water as vibrant red tentacles ripped free of their terrestrial confines. Each glimmered with moisture, with dew, she reminded herself, and she found a familiar shape tearing free of the ground before her.

_ Drosera katharas  _ was a curious specimen, not in that it was entirely carnivorous; that was rather common in the Isles, after all. No, it’s claim to fame was the sheer difficulty of growing a sample. Of the trust that had to be established between the plant and its tender. In the wild, a species of bird that spent its entire life cultivating the  _ Drosera  _ in exchange for protection from predators. In the greenhouses, the product of two semesters and more sleepless nights than she could count. 

Now, all that work was nothing. Had to be nothing. Because it stood between them and the entrance to the grottoes below. And there was nothing that could come before that, no matter how much it tore at her to admit it.

“How the blessed hell are we supposed to fight something like that?” Boscha asked, not necessarily directed at her, but perhaps at any gods that might be willing to intervene on their behalf.

“Divide and conquer?” Skara suggested switching out her short-necked string instrument for some sort of flute with a flick of her wrist.

“Meaning?” Willow asked, dodging out of the way of a spray of sticky dew. Three of the petal knights weren’t so lucky, finding themselves glued together and subsequently crushed under one of the creature’s tentacles.

“Gus distracts it,” Skara replied, stopping to blow a quick trill on her flute that stopped another tendril in its tracks, “I keep him from dying in the process, and the two of you make up the difference.”

“Well, when you put it like that...” Boscha quipped, trailing off as she lanced a fireball through the frozen tendril. 

“Don’t start with me,” Skara replied, grinning.

Three sets of eyes turned towards Willow in that moment, and she found herself nodding along. The determination that flared behind each gaze emboldened her own, and something inside of her strained but held fast. She forced herself to meet each in turn, finally settling on a trio that couldn’t quite meet her own.

“Remember the plan,” Willow asserted, as much to herself as the rest of them, and they sprung into action.

“The plan,” they’d called it, though really it was more of a general idea of how not to die. They knew that Midhir was in the grottoes below the greenhouses, though from what King had told them, he’d not heard anything from down below since they’d first opened it up. Why he never questioned where his soldiers were coming from was likely the same reason he’d thought he could build an empire of plants in an Isle full of fire-wielding witches.

_ He wasn’t exactly the sharpest athame on the altar. _

Still, there  _ was _ a plan. Their hope (and all they had at this point was hope) was that the reason Midhir still hadn’t reared his head was that he simply wasn’t prepared to make his return known. There was one critical weakness they could exploit, one that had allowed their ancestors to defeat him and if they had any shot at this at all, it was their only chance.

They knew his  _ Name _ .

Willow ducked under the first swinging tentacle, letting the dew hit and glue her to the ground. Which really only gave Boscha exactly the leverage she needed to spring off of the witch, dropping a vial as she went that shattered and dissolved the dew as it went. Took off a fair bit of armor too, but she was already regrowing that. Precious seconds wasted, but not unspent.

_ Because Boscha had her opening. _

Knowing his name had been the only way their ancestors could bind the Fae into his prison. Names held power, and the more power something held, the more its name could be used against it. He’d made a gamble, announcing himself the moment he’d arrived, and he’d worn his name on his sleeve ever since. It made him bold, reckless even, because every time he uttered it, revealed the secret to the world, it lost a bit of its power. The more people knew his name, the less concentrated the knowledge of it was, and the more fear of him spread.

Here was an outsider who feared no magic, who broke all laws that the witches of the Isles had considered sacred. At first, he’d just been one warlord amongst many, but as each of his rivals fell, those that remained knew something had to be done.

Boscha Stryder, former captain of the Banshees, had been a feared conqueror in her own time, and when she spiked the grudgby ball into the center of the creature’s mass, it wasn’t hard to see why. Tentacles wrapped and wove around each other in a split second, a shield over the creature’s heart that was nevertheless shredded to scraps by the white-hot sphere that tore through them.

Willow followed behind her, charging and crashing her way through the oncoming swarm that lashed and broke against her armored hide. Plates sundered and broke, only to be replaced in a moment. Magic drawn to its fullest potential, emotion providing the spark for a blaze that would not,  _ could not _ , be extinguished. 

_ It was a competition now, after all. _

Midhir had held titles, and bore them as names, and each one gave him power, but he held them only because he had  _ won  _ them. And if another could be proven greater, that same title would pass on to them. It was a death by a thousand cuts, the product of years, and if they were to survive, to have any chance against him, they’d have to replicate it in a matter of minutes.

_ One shot, four titles. _

~---~

_ Midhir, Whose Form is Like Water;  _ inheritor of the talent for deceit and deception his mother had used to bend an entire court to her will.

Gus’ illusory selves doubled, then tripled. Mist weaving about their feet and ink pouring from their mouths as the battlefield descended into something that transcended commotion, spat in the face of chaos. His staff spun havoc into the world, and the only reason it didn’t drive Willow mad is that she could see the subtle pattern which lay beneath. The openings he wove between the obstacles.

And underneath it all, the witch himself, who put those legs to work placing something at the center of it all and getting the hell out of dodge.

_ Midhir; Whose Horn Shakes the Isles;  _ the instrument in question having supposedly been forged from the horn of a dragon.  _ Their  _ version - a jury-rigged crystal ball and a bard’s trumpet - were just going to have to do.

The mists cleared faster than her eyes could track, wrapping around the heads of the only four witches in the clearing. Muffled though the world was, Willow’s ears still screamed in protest at the metallic screech that all but ripped the air asunder. When they cleared, all that was left in its passing were the shredded remains of half an army and a pile of glittering, crystal shards at their center.

As for the other half, well, they were wide open.

_ Midhir, the Beast of Bohrndell;  _ an absolute force of nature on the battlefield. Laying into his foes with blade and twisted claw alike, leaving nought in his wake but ash and ruin. Lucky for them, they just so happened to have someone equally unappealing on their side.

Unsatisfied with one near-death, Boscha launched volley after volley of incendiary wrath into the dazed remnants of the verdant horde. Spewed fire and acid as she ran along their flanks, transfigured claws finishing the few who weren’t already withering under the fusillade. As caught up in it as she was, she hardly noticed that her first target had turned its attention back towards her.

Or that she was dead in the path of two tentacles that would’ve left nothing more of her than a smear on the ground.

_ Midhir, Prince of the Hunt _ ; unflinching in the face of even the mightiest of beasts, the most fearsome the Isles had to offer. Though whether the beast ahead of her or the one behind was a question for which Willow didn’t have the answer.

There had been this awful, terrible moment when something inside of her had glued her feet to the earth. When she’d almost left the alchemist to her fate. But that wasn’t the plan.

_ And. That. Wasn’t. Her. _

The plant she’d grown from a seedling slammed into her with all the force of an avalanche, and still she held. The witch who’d tortured her since she was just as young lay somewhere behind, life blazing an impression on her senses.

“Willow, I-” came the voice it belonged to, more uncertain than she’d ever heard it. That uncertainty touched it at all was a miracle she wasn’t quite prepared for.

“If you’re going to tell me you’re sorry, I don’t want to hear it,” Willow gritted out past the strain of holding the creature at bay.

“I feel like I have to-”

“Well, you don’t,” Willow responded, cutting her off, “but you want to know what you can do?”

“Please,” Boscha begged her, “ _ tell _ me.”

“ _ End this _ .”

The heat that followed scorched her even through the armor, and she bore it as karma, stepping out of the way and letting the two monsters on the field duke it out in full. Boscha rocketed past, hands ablaze, and their eyes caught, the look behind them not even close to what she’d expected. Acceptance where she’d hoped for shame. Respect where she’d imagined there would be nought but indifference.

And just beneath that, an invitation. Beckoning her along into competition and the refinement of one edge upon another. Into the crucible from which something old could be melted down and forged into something new.

_ And she accepted it. _

Vines tore from the earth beneath her feet and propelled her to the alchemist’s pace, but it was her legs that kept it. Her arms that deflected globules of dew and sloughed away armor. That regrew not thick plates of bark, but something thinner, sharper. Lean and strong, yet not nearly so bulky. Fire raced along her form, but not the scarlet red of the witch beside her. 

No, that was left behind in a final eruption that propelled her forward in its intensity, armor all but burned away by a flame of blast furnace capacity, leaving nothing more than a single gauntlet that served as the pyre from which green flame  _ poured  _ and licked across her body. That she drove deep into the heart of the creature who lay exposed before her.

And it  _ fell _ , its burning corpse a presage of their arrival to the caverns far below. To the thing that lay beneath, honor-bound to meet their challenge or find what little power it had left snuffed out and stolen.

Her flame burnt down to embers, Willow slumped in place, but remained standing. All around her, the battle still raged, ever more knights breaking free of the earth and climbing out of the abyss into which she’d consigned their champion.

_ But her role was finished. At least for now. _

“You better be ready, Emira,” Willow called feebly to the sky above her, staving off the exhaustion that threatened to claim her. Glance at the knights that slowly surrounded them, and kept her eyes fixed on the sky. For salvation was upon them.

_ After all, they only had one shot at this, and they were far from finished. _

**-The Fledgling-**

Emira Blight, mistress of crows and youngest of the  _ Nua-Morrígna _ , was nothing if not reliable. Her eyes cast over the battlefield below, the few crows she’d already summoned ensuring nothing lay beyond her sight. Ears not entirely her own caught at Willow’s plea, and she knew her moment had come.

“Do me a favor, love?” she asked the witch just ahead of her, still unable (even after all this time) to head off the rush in her heart as she looked back. Amber met green, though simply calling them green was a grave offense. At any moment, they might hold every shade she’d ever seen or give way to something entirely new.

“You know the price,” Viney quipped in response, setting her heart ablaze. Indeed she did, and Emira gladly complied, meeting her lips in a ferocious embrace that never failed to leave her breathless. As she pulled away, chuckling at the beastkeeper’s still fluttering eyes, she met them and nodded.

She hesitated for less than a second, bless her, and then she turned Lowell sharply to the right beneath them. Emira let one hand trace gently across the witch’s cheek as she slipped past, leaving the saddle behind for the void that yawned beneath her.

_ And then she was falling. _

Cast into the empty night, and in the seconds between the fall and the moment when the Titan’s pull drew her down, she was aloft. No magic, no staff; just her determined face set towards the earth, resolute in the recognition of what must follow.

The first thing to pass her lips was a scream, defiant against the ever-approaching ground. The second a whisper, lost to the wind, and her coat fell away in a swirl of feathers, never truly there in the first place. And the third and final? Laughter, high and clear, as triumph followed in her wake.

For in that barest fraction between something and nothing, the fall and its end, only there could one find infinity, and from that precipice, she drew power.

_ And it rushed before her in a swarm. _

The ink-crows wrapped around her long before her demise, cushioning her fall and setting her gently to the ground. Hands crossing, fingers snapping as they went, her staff returned from the aether, already spinning. Indigo fire crackled to a pulsing glow as the circle formed, not in front of her, but around her waist. Her sixth opened and fractalized, the composite of seventy and seven sets of eyes, and she beheld the battlefield anew. 

To her left, Augustus, weaving illusions of his own with a skill and power that far exceeded his years. Still a novice though, unused to the fray, and unaware of the strange, creeping thing that had nearly wound its way around his legs. Three of her flock broke free, tearing death away from the witchling’s shoulders without him ever realizing the edge he stood upon. And as they went, one’s talon caught his shoulder, and a gash tore open along her own.

Healing magic, warm and familiar, sealed the wound soon after the initial sting, but even that remedy at this distance taxed the witch at the other end of their Bond, and Emira knew she had to hurry.

_ Control over this many always had its drawbacks. _

Like the trio of petal knights who’d broken past Willow’s exhausted defense, headed straight for the newcomers whose names Emira still couldn’t quite place. Regardless, their assailants were torn apart piece by piece as they charged, til all that made it to their destination were a few scraps of plant matter, a lone blade, the tattered scraps of a petal.

Unconsciously, Emira had continued to laugh, and that same joy spilt over into the flock. Their voices cawed as the fire which drove them burned higher, brighter. One-by-one, her foes fell around her, though if they knew fear, they never showed it, and she couldn’t help but feel respect flare alongside it. Perhaps, in a time long distant, they’d faced these talons before. Heard the unspoken words that guided their orbits. They certainly seemed to realize that it was best to target the source, judging by the number that broke ranks and surged towards her. 

Yet even as they fell, their blades never meeting her skin, still cuts and lacerations bloomed along it, quickly sequestered away by surging arcana that came slower each time. She was flagging, fading, and all because the flock  _ hungered _ . Because it wasn’t so much control as it was containment. And with each blow that she redirected from those who didn’t deserve their bite, her own body took the punishment. 

_ There was a plan, wasn’t there? _

There had been, and in the moment before she’d almost lost herself to the madness, the next surge that healed her body sent a single word straight to her mind and lightning raced down her spine.

“ _ Cuimhnigh _ ”

_ Remember. _

“ **_Bíodh eagla ort agus bí briste,_ ** ” she rasped in response, voice split and echoed back seventy-seven times over from the storm of talons and spattering ichor that surrounded her.

Each crow flew in its own direction, found its own quarry, and dug deep into where it perched, finding the chamber it needed to echo the call further. And with each voice that rose above the din, she  _ forced  _ the fear into the charging warriors.

_ And they broke. _

An opening, all that they needed, though that was the easy part. There was a part of her that wanted to follow, to watch over them still as they did what came next, but there was a purpose to the flashy display that already drew at her waning power. To demoralize, to frighten, and to  _ distract _ . Emira settled in for what promised to be a night to remember, pressed her back against the witch that pushed on her own, no longer in the sky above her.

No, their role was to hold the gate, to give the rest time. Enough to find their quarry, to bind him before his power waxed. And as they met and threw themselves into the abyss before them, Lowell carrying them safely below, she wished them luck, but she couldn’t split her focus for more than a second. Seventy and eight was pushing it, but one less was something she could manage.  _ Would have to manage. _

But she did have some solace beyond the magic that passed along her frame and sewed her arms back together. Because even though the knights turned to face her, warded from aiding their master by the flock, she knew something they didn’t. The crows were  _ hungry _ , and now she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting caught in the cross. The thought brought a grin to her face, half of anticipation and half of relief.

_ They were long overdue for a proper feast. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus, we come to our penultimate chapter. It all comes to a close after this one. Thanks to everyone who's picked up on this little side story of mine and has showed their support for it. You're all absolutely wonderful, and I'm eager to share what I've planned next. Until then!


	5. Symphony of Destruction

* * *

**ob** **·** **li** **·** **ga** **·** **tion**

/,äbləˈɡāSH(ə)n/

_noun_

**\- an act or course of action to which a person is morally or legally bound; a duty or commitment.**

\- the condition of being morally or legally bound to do something.

\- (Law) a binding agreement committing a person to a payment or other action.

* * *

**-The Bard-**

There’s this story that’s rattled around in Skara’s head for a while. This tale of a bard who’d lost his love and descended into the underworld to pull her back. As most human stories tend to go, the world beyond them was mysterious, cruel, and deceptive, and as a result, the bard was given the opportunity to lead his love back to the world of the living, but given a condition. He could not look back, even for a moment, or she would be lost to him forever.

He always did, but what came next varied in the versions she’d read.

In some, his love smiled in understanding, knowing that he could not bear to look away from her, to risk deception, and passed beyond the veil with that warmth in her heart. In others, she was angry with him; rebuked him for being unable to follow simple instructions - doubting their love. That it was his fault they could not be together. Still, neither of the versions begged the question; why?

Why was the bard not allowed to glance back at his love? Why would the lord of the underworld place such a cruel stipulation upon their salvation after being so moved by the bard that he would allow such a thing in the first place? To hear humans tell it, such things were simply the way of those who hail from other worlds. That they were different, and harsh, and alien. Nevermind the fact that souls which pass on to the next life are forever changed by the experience. That there is a reason necromancy is not often practiced, and never with souls themselves.

That there is a time and place for all things, and disrupting that careful balance would bring only disaster.

For example, diving into an abyss full of untold horrors to attempt to bind one of the Fae. Though Skara could hardly imagine a time or place where such a thing would be appropriate at all. Worse still, none of them were oracles, or binders, or any sort of witch that would be capable of doing such a thing.

No, that would have been too easy. Orpheus didn’t bend Hades’ ear with a crystal ball; didn’t evoke Persphone’s sorrow with a carefully constructed ward. He passed into the dark with nothing but his lyre, his hope, and his love. She was missing one of those things, but she hoped between the other three witches, one of them would fill the gap.

But as light broke the darkness ahead of her, she couldn’t help but squeeze her bow and pray that whoever held dominion over these dark halls - Hades or his ancestor whose corpse they inhabited - could hear her voice.

_She’d take any help she could get._

~---~

Lowell set them off at the edge of a cliff, lingering for a moment before he turned tail and flapped his way back up into the darkness. Skara hardly blamed the creature. He’d had a hard enough time getting them down there, and his eyes weren’t built for these sorts of conditions, however beautiful they may have been.

Faintly luminous vines hung over trellises fused into the walls of the cavern, casting what little light they could over the expanse of carefully tended gardens and ponds, planters and displays of all kinds. Beside her, Willow let out an audible sigh of relief, and Skara felt hope kindle for the witch. She’d been terrified that these samples, apparently priceless beyond belief, had been lost in the struggle. 

But as they walked, she could feel that hope begin to diminish. Something else was in this cavern with them, and the more her eyes adjusted to its dim light, the more she could make out the subtle signs of their presence. Every flowering plant turned towards some point ahead of them, as if drawing their light from it rather than the vines above. The vines themselves seemed to shift ever so slightly, growing and shrinking as if breathing in time with something to which they were bound.

The ground dipped before them, cut into a series of wide shallow steps that curved around the edge of a bowl maybe a hundred feet across. Mushrooms of every imaginable hue sprouted from every crack and crevice; crept along low retaining walls that had failed to contain them; ran up the lengths of stalagmites that jutted from the floor. The faint dusting of spores hung in the air, drifting on wind of no origin, either cast there or pulled from some point beyond her sight.

And at the center of it all stood Midhir.

He was as tall as she’d expected, standing a full head and shoulders over Gus. Like all fae, he had horns - great sweeping antlers that swept away from his head and curved over him like a crown. Ears thinner and longer than her own, eyes with pupils sharp and keen that _glowed_ a pale yellow in the half-darkness. There was this sort of… hollow beauty to him. His form, tall and imperious, though sunken and gaunt, still held its rigid posture. The regal bearing that marked him as the sort of creature meant to be set above others…

Skara caught her thoughts the moment before the plunge, forcing herself to look away. She’d read stories of the glamours that the fae wove around themselves - the webs of enchantment and illusion that drove lesser creatures to praise and fear them. The bard refused to let herself be taken in by such things, mentally bracing herself before turning her gaze back to the creature. To see the truth that lay beneath the web of lies.

He was _withered_ \- weakened and made ragged by all the long years of his captivity. Golden hair gone dull and lifeless hung around a face whose high cheekbones now resembled long-weathered cliffs. His body somehow at once both nearly emaciated and still packed with muscle - as if there were some part of him that held on, that simply refused to wither. That remembered the warrior he had once been.

Other relics of that past still remained. The crown and singular bracer he wore still gleamed with the distinct hue of fae-brass, its golden surface flickering with barely contained fire. His left arm, taken at the shoulder, replaced by a finely articulated limb whose hue she knew belonged not to silver, but to mercury. Around his neck and ankles were relics of another sort - chains of iron that may have once burned his bare skin, but now rested against scar tissue and callous. 

He was a noble creature reduced to a miserable husk; a proud warrior laid low and bound in chains; an ancient foe of the Isles, brought to justice and left to rot. All of these things were a _piece_ of the truth, but the full of it rested in his eyes. Sunken though they may be, they burned with a fire that was eerily similar to the same she’d seen burning all her life. No one truly knew where witches fell in relation to the fae - what deeper connection left them looking like two branches of the same tree, but in that moment, something about that fire made Skara think it may have been a far closer kinship than any of them had expected.

He stood in silent regard of the witches before him, eyes barely passing over as they fixated on some distant, unseeable point far above them. Finally, he spoke, and the sound of it almost _buckled_ her for its tone, the octaves it effortlessly swept through and the myriad harmonies within that threatened to overwhelm her.

“I am Midhir; child of Oberon and Mab,” he rasped in a half-dozen voices that warred for dominance, “Herald of Autumn’s Triumph; Whose Form is Water; Whose Horn Shakes the Isles. The Beast of Bohrndell. Prince of the Hunt.”

With each title, the air around them grew thick and oppressive with the weight behind them. One by one, the disparate voices fell away, leaving only a rich timbre that still wormed its way past her first line of defenses, prodding at the vulnerable mind that lay beneath.

“Are you?” Willow asked, and the energy building around them stilled and froze. Hung suspended and brittle in the air; inaccessible by all.

“What have you done?” The fae snarled back at her, composure broken. His noble countenance gone in an instant, replaced by something that bore fangs twice as long as her own. With eyes that no longer glowed, but _burned_ with all the hues of autumn.

_Lucky her; she got to issue the challenge._

“Midhir, child of Oberon and Mab,” Skara announced, forcing her voice to the closest thing resembling even and clear she could manage, “To thee, we issue this challenge. Between us, we claim thine titles as our own, save for that thou art guaranteed by birthright. Here, in this place where thine defeat was once sealed, we follow in the paths of our ancestors. By our hands, thou shalt be broken, bowed, and bound.”

“Is that so?” He asked, laughter bleeding into his tone. Skara blinked past the magic creeping just at the edge of her senses, flaring a bit of bile to be certain he hadn’t snuck his hooks in already. Satisfied that he hadn’t, she forged on.

“By the rite of the Twin Queens, you are honor-bound to-”

“Oh I know the laws,” Midhir interrupted, “I was there when they were written” - he paused for a moment, eyes closing faintly as if caught in the reverie of something unseen - “But tell me; is this truly the path you wish to walk down?”

“The challenge is issued thrice and made true,” Skara replied, not quite able to keep the tremble out of her voice, “and as challengers, we reserve the right to choose the means of combat.”

“Your challenge is accepted. Choose away,” he responded, eyes passing over them appraisingly.

“Bodies and spellcraft only,” Willow asserted, stepping back to the fore and meeting his gaze dead-on, “no tool or implement forged by any creature, mortal or otherwise, nor any weapon of the same origin shall be permitted.” The gesture and the laughter it pulled from him painted the fae amused, but Skara could make out the faintest bit of annoyance etched into his body language. Silently, she thanked whoever was listening that Willow hadn’t faltered. It had been hell to find the proper way to challenge a noble-blooded fae in the hour she’d been given, but the twins’ bookcases had been surprisingly well-stocked on the subject.

“I accept these conditions,” Midhir replied hollowly, turning his back to them and walking a few paces before pivoting to position. Bringing both hands up, he brought them across his chest, and a pair of thin blades clattered to the ground before him. With another gesture from his waist, a quiver of arrows appeared from the aether and thudded beside them.

Willow simply took up her own position thirteen paces his opposite, the armor around her thinner than Skara remembered, though somehow seemed sturdier. Not grown hastily and slapped together, but carefully molded and layered over her form. With the completion of a spell circle, green fire crept along her knuckles, flickering just beneath the surface of her gauntlets.

“You carry no weapon, daughter of the Isles?” Midhir asked, seemingly genuine in his curiosity, though something lurked beneath it that, like everything about this creature, set Skara on edge. She’d thought herself skilled at hidden meanings, but he wove them into every word as naturally as breathing.

“My body is my weapon,” Willow responded, leaving no room for interpretation in _her_ words, “My magic the only shield I need.”

“In another life, you would have made a fine addition to my armies.”

“I’ve seen your army. I’m not impressed.”

“Pale reflections of what once was; the barest fraction of all that shall soon be,” Midhir replied, the tone of it at once nostalgic, a threat, and a promise. “Perhaps, when it is you who lies broken, you might convince me to spare you.”

“I’d sooner die,” the witch called back, and that, more than anything else that had been said in the circle, rang with truth. Midhir seemed to realize it as well, and he shook his head slightly. The gesture of it dismissive in the same way a parent might show disappointment in a child who meddles in things far beyond them.

“Then you shall,” he whispered, just at the edge of hearing.

In an instant, he was upon her.

~---~

Willow took the blow like an oak bearing the full weight of the storm; which is to say she creaked, groaned, and even bent but ultimately held her ground. The stone beneath her wasn’t so lucky, literally _cracking_ under the force of the blow, and Skara wondered how the witch could still possibly be standing after taking it head-on.

But she wasn’t just standing.

Her fist met the fae’s jaw with enough force to send him sprawling, and Skara’s entire perception of the world went with him. Something about him _flickered_ mid-air, and he hit the stone on his feet, skidding to a halt some thirty feet away from them. Laughter echoed through the cavern as that same fire burst into life along his mercurial arm, wrapping it in claws of burning malice. Still, Willow steadily closed the distance between them.

“Oh, thou art approaching me?” Midhir asked, casting the cavern into stark relief with his flames, “Instead of letting thine fear take you, thou art coming right to me?”

“I can’t beat the shit out of you without getting closer,” Willow responded, voice even and reverberant in the chamber.

“Then come as close as ye like,” the fae responded, meeting her pace as the two _walked_ towards their inevitable confrontation. The sensation of it, their powers drawing near to each other step by painstaking step, it took her breath away. Every living thing in the cavern seemed turned towards them, unwilling or unable to look away.

That’s when she realized how badly they’d miscalculated.

At some unspoken signal, fire lanced from his arm, sputtering and splitting into a half-dozen bolts that streaked not just towards Willow, but to Boscha as well. The alchemist barely dodged out of the way of the first two, but the third caught her in the chest. Acrid smoke followed in its wake; blown agony across Skara’s eyes that forced them shut.

“That wasn’t our deal!” Willow snarled from somewhere in the darkness.

“The fernae is possessed of no weapon but her body and spellcraft,” Midhir responded, voice weaving through the nothing like an old friend, “If she did not wish to partake, she should have said as much.”

Blinking back tears, Skara forced her eyes open, hands scrambling to find the witch who’d been beside her. Who’d been- No, Boscha was there somewhere. Had to be there. If she could just-

Relief flooded her at the hand that settled on her arm, the familiar pattern of calluses that confirmed its identity. But as her eyes met the three looking back at her, it was what she saw over her shoulder that demanded her attention.

“Truly, child,” Midhir drawled, crossing the distance between him and Willow in a heartbeat, “thou should worry more for thineself.”

If she’d sent him sprawling across the ground, the fae’s blow against her sent her _flying_. Her form tumbled through the air, weightless, before slamming into a copse of mushrooms that cracked and shattered under her. Spores billowed out from the point of impact, obscuring the scene even further. 

Beside her, Skara felt Boscha tense. Eyes darted to the sight as she forced herself up, Skara noticing for the first time the cloth the alchemist held to her side. The tincture she’d applied to it and, as she pulled it away, the nasty burn it had been pressed over.

“Boscha,” Skara warned, grabbing her hand, “you’re hurt.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied, that same tone to her voice that she’d had during every match, every competition, “I’m going to end this.”

Then she was gone, boots hitting the cavern floor in a staccato that Skara knew all too well; that a part of her was convinced she was hearing for the last time. Midhir’s fist fell, meteoric, towards the point where Willow had vanished, and the moment before it connected, a fireball erupted along his flank. The instant he was thrown off, a familiar form burst free of the rubble, rattling off a complex series of motions that left _Skara_ dazed, let alone the fae bearing them.

_But one common enemy does not a good team make._

Midhir was ready for Willow’s next flurry of blows, blocking the first two and directing the third towards Boscha, who just barely managed to get out of the way of a punch that shaved a section off of the stalactite it hit instead.

“Watch where you’re going, Park!” Boscha snarled back at her, nevertheless covering the witch’s back with a wall of flame.

“Watch your fucking head!” Willow responded, forcing the alchemist’s shoulders down the moment before Midhir’s scything claws separated the aforementioned skull from her body.

Tension built in Skara’s shoulders, her teeth gritting as she watched the two witches get pushed back again and again. Each blow met with one three times greater. Every burst of fire subsumed by torrents of brilliantly-hued flame that flooded from the seams of the fae’s metal arm. Boscha popped the cork on a bottle and drained it, and Midhir’s fist cracked and rebounded off of skin suddenly turned hard as stone, but it was only a temporary measure. He was beating them, slowly but surely, and all the bard could do was watch.

“There has to be something we can do!” Gus shouted over the din, meeting her eyes with an expression half question and half desperation.

“Not unless we want him to include us in the duel as well,” Skara replied, forcing a calm to her tone that she didn’t feel.

“Damn it,” Gus swore, surprising her not only with the word, but the resignation behind it. His eyes flashed to hers, something unreadable behind them, and then he vanished.

Less than a moment later, he appeared before Willow, arms held out defensively, and Midhir laughed savagely. Two hammer blows fell on the illusionist’s shoulders, crushing him with such casual, contemptuous force that there may as well have been no resistance at all.

_But, of course, there wasn’t._

The real Gus popped into existence behind the fae, a spell circle nearly drawn that crackled with cerulean power. As he completed it, Skara caught the briefest flash of energy before he pressed the hand to the creature’s back, and lightning struck far beneath the earth.

Somewhere deep inside of her, Skara knew the _sound_ that thing made; that awful, ripping howl that passed its lips would stay with her for the rest of her days.

It was primal and keen, etched with pain that its owner was entirely unused to, could not even begin to comprehend. Followed by another blow, delivered by an arm that twitched and shuddered but still sailed true towards the illusionist, and were it not for the armor-clad witch who interposed herself between them, that same part of Skara knew Gus would have died then and there.

Instead, the fae’s fist met bark hardened to steel, resounding off of the curved plate with a satisfying crack and another, fainter yowl of pain. Midhir disengaged from the sudden burst of resistance, stalking back from them, his body hunched and tense like a beast. Claws and magic held at the ready as he plotted, schemed, searched for an opening.

“What are you _doing_ ?” Willow called back to her Bondmate, arms held up defensively between him and the fae he’d attacked _directly._

“Keeping you from getting yourself killed, hopefully,” Gus replied, strain covered but not completely hidden in his tone.

Midhir pounced, claws raised, only to find himself facing down a trio of Willows that flickered and shifted in place. The fae caught the first, only for it to collapse into mist at his touch, the real witch taking the opportunity to land another snarl-inducing blow across his chest. Before he could counter, a vial shattered against his side, acid hissing and sputtering along his flank.

His hand flashed to knock another vial from the air, but it met a stalactite instead, the stone fading the moment his momentum was arrested. Glass shattered again, this time releasing a burst of liquid fire on impact, and his eyes flashed not to the alchemist who had thrown it, but to the illusionist who made it possible. Twin flames burst to life as Boscha and the fae rocketed towards Gus in tandem, who instinctively called fog up around him that dissipated the moment it met such heat.

Boscha made it a split second sooner, grabbing the witch and pulling him down with her, but not before the fae’s claw lashed across her burn, pulling a scream from her throat that sent Skara’s heart plummeting. He turned in the air, claws flashing in the light of his own flame before they struck the killing blow, and Skara _broke._

She hardly even realized she was forming the circle before it was already complete. Had just enough sense to press the magic not through an instrument, but through the only medium her body had. And when the scream tore free of her throat, laced with nothing more than a single note, it tore into the fae with enough force to send his claws careening into the stone beside Boscha’s head. His eyes though, those locked directly on _her_.

“Four on one?” he drawled, drawing up to his full height as Gus frantically pulled Boscha away, “It hardly seems fair. Then again, thou hath saved me the trouble of reclaiming my titles individually."

His form flickered, fire flashing around it, and suddenly the distance between them could be measured in feet rather than yards.

“So in a way, I suppose I should thank thee.”

The world around her drew to a crawl.

Just past the fae leaping for her throat, Skara could see her companions. Willow, rushing towards her, though not nearly fast enough for it to matter. Boscha laying on the ground, hurt worse than she’d ever seen her; whether or not she was even _breathing_ an uncertainty the bard couldn’t bear to consider. And Gus, well, he’d broken the rules for her. His staff was in his hands, already spinning into a spell that could change the tide of the battle.

Midhir seemed to notice as well, judging by the feral grin that passed along his features; the way his arms moved perilously slow, the muted clattering of his blades signaling that her friends would have their work cut out for them after he removed her from the picture.

Skara _wanted_ to say that, in her last moments, she met her coming death with some sort of clarity; some sudden burst of bravery in the face of unimaginable terror. But as the first tendrils of fog swept past him, propelled along by the magic of a witchling she so desperately wanted to see grow into his own, all she could do was bear the weight of further regrets.

Of how her parents had held such high hopes for their daughter now that the world around her no longer demanded such violence, such cruelty.

Or how her siblings had looked up to her; some more grudgingly than others. How they’d have to walk themselves home now. Have to find someone else to muddle through their homework with them.

Or how she’d finally found a way to pull her Eurydice back from the brink, only for that chance to be stolen away at the very gates of death.

No, Skara was glad for the fog that billowed up around her, reducing the world to just her and the claws that had nearly reached her throat. At least then, none of them would have to see what came next. The tears that streaked down her face. The utter terror that froze her to that very spot. The end that that same small part of her knew would come to them all, now that there was no way to bind its herald.

_But it never came._

The mists hid the sight of it, but there was a faint rasping of something metallic within them; the dull thud of something that followed. His claws caught just at the edge of her throat, the choking sound that came after decidedly not her own. The fog drew back as wind picked up behind her, and it revealed Midhir, caught in place, a four foot spear of dripping black metal ran through his shoulder and halting his frenetic pace.

“You dare!” he called to some point behind her, fangs bared.

“I do,” Emira responded, voice laced with power and barely contained rage, “by right of the Morrígna, _I dare_.”

“The Morrígna are dead!”

“Their daughters yet live, as you well know.”

“And yet they choose thee as their representative?” Midhir responded, pulling the spear from his shoulder and tossing it to the air. Midway through, it broke apart into a trio of crows, returning to the swarm that followed in the wake of the witch who passed her. “Hardly a woman” the fae spat in contempt, “barely a witch.”

“And yet enough of both to end you,” Emira replied, calling a dozen of her crows to bear, condensing them into short, hooked blades that hovered just within reach.

“We shall see, child.”

The fae pounced, twin blades flying into his hands from the cavern beyond and met Emira edge to edge, the rasping keen of their impact grating at Skara’s ears. Beneath the pain, she felt a pressure release somewhere in her chest - her conservatory made available.

Emira hadn’t ended their duel, simply changed the rules.

_And Skara still had a role to play._

~---~

She found Viney exactly where she’d expected. Both hands pressed to Boscha’s side, flickering streams of emerald sewing the alchemist back together. Weakly, her eyes fluttered open, the bottom two settling on the healer, but the third darting across the cavern before finding _her._

“Did it work?” Boscha rasped to the beastkeeper, one hand finding her wrist.

“Oh yeah, all the way,” Viney replied, pressing her hand back down. “Your bomb did the trick. Certainly got the peacekeepers’ attention at least. Lilith is _not_ pleased, but Emira’s the best she can do.”

Boscha’s face fell from hope to confusion, but Skara’s mind flared with sudden realization.

“The Rite of the Twin Queens,” she whispered, and the beastkeeper nodded along.

“Exactly,” she confirmed, “Fair conduct between the Fae Courts and mortalkind. Big guy over there,” she continued, gesturing to Midhir, currently locked in pitched combat against their resident conjurer, “can only use as much power as we send against him. Em could cut in on the duel and keep it civil by invoking the right of the Morrígna, but that’s pushing it as it is. If the peacekeepers came down here, or Titan forbid, _Lilith_ , we’d all be in serious trouble.”

“We’re in serious trouble as it is,” Boscha quipped weakly, pushing herself to a sitting position, Viney cutting off her protest and simply helping her along.

“Right you are, Vostok-” Emira replied, suddenly perched beside them.

“It’s Boscha.”

“Doesn’t matter. Hey, resident bard, think we could get a head-start on that binding thing?”

“You want me to do it in the middle of a fight?” Skara asked incredulously, brain catching up to the sudden appearance and casting her gaze wildly around the cavern in search of the fae. Thankfully, Gus and Willow seemed to have him occupied with the help of a few dozen crows, but his eyes still locked on hers through the melee, and her blood ran _cold._

“Obviously,” Emira replied, drawing her back to the conversation, “It’s not like I can match him in an armed duel.”

“You _can’t_?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“Apparently one of the Morrígna,” Skara replied, knowing _exactly_ what was implied by the title.

“Touché,” Emira conceded, “but still.”

“Fine, I’ll get a start on it, but one thing,” the bard amended, pressing a finger under the older witch’s chin.

“Now’s really not the time for-” Emira began, flagging as Skara pressed again, “Fine, what is it?”

“My name’s Skara, hers is Boscha, and since we’re about to save your asses, you better learn them, got it?”

Silence held for a moment as a faint grin passed along Emira’s features. She wanted to read humor from it, but something about the witch’s eyes quelled her ever so slightly. Made her realize exactly the sort of situation she was in.

“Aye-aye ma’am,” Emira quipped, breaking the tension, “but you’d better hurry, or pretty soon the only name that’ll matter is _his_ ”

“What a coincidence,” Skara joked back, pushing herself to her feet as the eldest Blight vanished in a storm of feathers and ink. Chuckling to herself despite the chaos around her, the bard couldn’t help but wonder if Amity knew the sort of trouble her sister got into.

Pushing past the thought, she hesitated for only a moment before deciding on which instrument to call up, conjuring it from the air and taking the familiar form in hand. Her chin settled onto the rest of the violin, fingers reaching out subconsciously to the pegs to tune the instrument, though a quick run of the strings let her know that was unnecessary. 

_Pre-emptive tuning saving her bacon again._

Skara glanced over the bridge at the illusionist that appeared at her left, nodding as he set his staff to the ground beside him. Fog billowed, and Boscha took up position at her right, groaning and grimacing all the way. Viney brought up the rear, and she felt calm wash over her. 

The plan was simple enough. Distract the fae with their two best fighters, protect the impromptu binder at all costs, and hope against hope that it was enough. The bard in question set her bow to the strings, forced herself to relax, and took one, final deep breath.

**“Midhir,”** she called to the cavern beyond, voice magically enhanced by mere proximity to her instrument, **“ye who have wrapped thineself in titles. With these notes and words thou shalt be bound!”**

Skara began to play, improvisational and loose, bound not to any set of notes that had been played before but to the subtle resonances of the name that still echoed around her. Her bow tore across the strings nearly beyond her control, a vibrato that seemed perpetually on the verge of a trill. Tempestuous and chaotic, yet somehow carrying within it a motif that seemed so decidedly akin to the fae she was binding that she knew she’d guessed true.

_She’d pegged him for the sort of guy who enjoyed a mean fiddle._

He didn’t seem impressed by her performance, judging by the way he howled (in key, no less), and threw himself towards her with reckless abandon. Fast enough he may have been to dodge Emira’s knives, but when Willow ripped her way free of the earth just ahead of him and put a fire-backed punch directly between his eyes it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing he could ignore.

**“Midhir, Whose Form is Like Water; thine illusions fool none, deceit’s exposed author.”**

Bindings took many different forms, depending on the target. Demons and the like responded best to carefully worded contracts and mathematically sophisticated wards. Various nature spirits could be placated and kept in place by regular offerings and the occasional sacrifice. Fae, on the other hand, dealt exclusively in words. In promises and lies, deceptions and deals. So when it came time to bind one, it was best to know their name. For someone who’d taken the gambit of freely giving such a thing, titles would have to do instead.

Without them, he was naught but the name he'd given, and with it known, he could be bound. Still, the words _had_ to be true. Had to draw upon his titles and refute them so totally as to allow no room for objection. In a very roundabout way, she had to drag him so hard he’d have nothing to fall back on but his own name. And she _relished_ the opportunity.

Midhir stumbled past Willow, only to meet the fist of an illusory duplicate of himself. And then another, and another. Out of the corner of her eye, Skara saw Gus flashing with barely contained power, normally invisible, but now fully so in the magically charged atmosphere that surrounded the binding. Her breath caught as another strand of magic grew steadily more visible in the air. 

The tenuous strand of his Bond to Willow, faltering under the punishment they'd both taken. And if the look that passed across the fae's features was anything to go by, he'd seen it too.

Rather than focus on the illusions ahead of him, Midhir lashed through them with a wild haymaker that connected with the witch’s armored form, sending her sprawling across the ground with enough force to shatter her plate entirely. Gus caught Skara’s eyes for a moment, pleading with her, and she nodded assent, pressing forward as he vanished.

Emira struck next, warding away the fae with a swarm of crows that tore and ripped at his flesh, but he simply bore the pain and walked through. With each injury borne, he grabbed one of the beasts, crushing it in its hands and causing the witch to gasp in pain as each successive loss tore at her arms. Her posture faltered, uncharacteristic weakness peaking through, and Midhir pressed the advantage.

**“Midhir,”** Skara shouted, blasting him away with as much magic as she dared to spare, **“Whose Horn Shakes the Isles; thine horn sundered, thine body spared from its trials.”**

Emira followed in its wake, condensing her crows back to blades and desperately driving him back. Willow and Gus appeared at Skara's side, and she spared a glance for the witch; her eyes closed, chest barely heaving. Fangs bared, she pressed on, running through a complex series of chords that struck a blow against the fae with each note drawn.

The witch ahead of her startled her by breaking into laughter, feathers falling around her as crows met brass and fell, their brethren taking up their place as knives, swords, spears; anything which could meet the onslaught of the outsider that bore down on her. Still, she laughed, the sound of it pale and hollow, and beneath his bravado, beneath that smug sense of superiority and even the bestial fury that lay below that, Skara _swore_ she saw fear pass his eyes for the first time that night.

**“Midhir, Prince of the Hunt; predator reduced to prey, thine very life an affront.”**

The last syllable cut the air, and he howled in twisted harmony, clasping his fists together and bringing them down in a hammer blow that shattered the stones below and sent a wall of flame careening towards them. 

Then, a moment of clarity, a third voice joining the harmony; a scream raised in defiance as a familiar form stepped to the wall, met its fury, and tore it in two. The fae behind it sneered in anger, in derision at the witch who would dare face him, and three eyes stared back.

Boscha wove between the fae’s blows and Skara’s notes as something flickering and forgotten rekindled and blazed anew. As fire raced from mind to string along the air to the witch that fought, and scraped, and matched the fae blow for blow. His fists no longer the hammers they’d once been, but reduced to a strength she could hope to endure. Yet still he pushed her, and defiant though she may have been, Boscha was still just a witch, and when she faltered, he drove his claws home.

They lanced through her side, and Boscha’s agony was not hers alone, but still Skara pushed forward, strands of hair from her bow splitting off as she pushed even the ensorcelled instrument to its limit. Fire burst from her fingers unbidden and erupted from the alchemist’s side as well, sealing the wounds shut and giving her the leverage to strike at the fae’s eyes with claws of her own.

**“Midhir,”** Skara called to the empty night, to the magic that drew at the boundary from whichever domain would claim him, **“Beast of Bohrndell; Thou art no match to we whose bodies are tested by hell.”**

_And. He. Broke._

Forced to his back leg by a force that ripped from her instrument far beyond anything she could have managed alone, Midhir was forced to kneel before those who had taken his titles from under him.

**“With a hundred syllables, I bind thee!”**

Willow, barely resting for a moment, strands of emerald salvation trailing behind her as she drove a blow home that shattered the creature’s jaw.

**“Titles won by contest true, I bind thee!”**

His feeble attempts to pull himself back to his feet, thwarted by creepers formed of mist and shadow that anchored him to the earth, the last of Gus’ magic going with them as they vanished.

**“Midhir, thine name is laid bare, I bind thee!”**

Emira, falling from above, two blades left to her own name, and each driven into his shoulders; a souvenir for the other side.

**“Spoken thrice and made true, thou art bound eternally!”**

Something _snapped_ ; a tension to the air that had undercut all others, undetected until the moment when it was finally dispelled. Midhir’s head drew back as fire burst free of his form, as something much greater made one final, desperate attempt to escape its imprisonment, only for chains of mist and shadow, vine and fire, sound and ink to lash around the essence of the fae and pull it down to the earth. Overlapping magics that tore into his very soul, binding him to the Isles with such intensity that there was barely a moment to scream, until all that remained of him was a sprout planted in stone, and a crown that lay at its side.

Skara faltered, her magic burned to the quick, stumbling in a vain attempt to stay upright before falling to her knees. All around her, voices mumbled and echoed as if they were passing through water, and her vision drew to a point. To eyes that met hers, livid on grey, and then the long slow descent into something dark, and warm, and not entirely unfamiliar.

_And the world went still._

**-The Alchemist-**

Boscha ignored the pain in her side, the tension in the muscles there that tore a faint gasp from her lips every other step. Readjusting her hold on the witch in her arms, she walked the short distance from the abyss behind her to the stretchers laid out on the ground at the center of the courtyard, only then allowing Skara to be anywhere but in her arms.

Still, she remained by her side. Even as the healers passed tinctures past her lips and pulled her back from the brink of near-fatal exhaustion. Even as peacekeepers passed her by in favor of talking to the witchlings with less fire in their eyes.

And it was all she could do to bite back her tongue when at last one of them demanded she rise and show her respect to the Matron, who’d finally deigned to grace them with her presence.

“You’ve all managed to put me in quite the difficult position,” Lilith Clawthorne mused, glancing out over what rubble remained of the greenhouses.

“Matron,” Emira interjected, voice more formal than Boscha had ever heard it, “allow me to speak on behalf of these witchlings. They were under my care and direction-”

“That won’t be necessary, Miss Blight,” Lilith assured, interrupting her. “I said that you’ve placed _me_ in quite the difficult position, not yourselves. Am I to understand that this all began as a routine investigation of irregularities in your respective departments?”

All eyes turned to Boscha, and she forced herself to nod.

“Miss Park,” Lilith continued, turning away from Boscha, apparently satisfied with her answer, “Would you say that the vast majority of blame for this incident would rest on the fae that you all - rather heroically I might add - bound and prevented from taking such action any further?”

“That… would be a fair assessment,” Willow replied, coaching her voice into the same formality.

“And would I be correct in stating that you took every possible opportunity to address this issue, alert the proper authorities, and put your own lives on the line to hold off this invader until our forces could arrive to support you.”

“That would be correct, Matron,” Emira replied, barely managing to hide her smile as she bowed in respect.

“Then I must say,” Lilith concluded, “it is a terrible shame that your scrolls were affected by the ambient magic of exposure to one of the fae, rendering them incapable of contacting us sooner.”

“Terrible shame, indeed, Matron,” Gus replied, “I’ll look into repairing them right away.”

“Please do so, Mr. Porter. I would _hate_ for something like this to happen again.”

At that, Lilith just turned and walked away, stopping after a few steps to leave them with one last parting statement.

“If it were to happen again,” she all but _teased_ , “I would have no choice to make you all peacekeepers; the better to keep an eye on you.”

Boscha stared at her retreating form in utter confusion, starting as a hand clapped on her shoulder.

“Good work on that bomb, Boscha,” Emira quipped, a knowing grin on her face.

“You didn’t tell you were working with them,” Boscha replied with a scowl.

“It seems there are many things that were said and left unsaid tonight,’” Emira needled, deepening the alchemist’s scowl. “You may want to get better at reading between the lines if you’re going to stick around this one,” she added, gesturing down at Skara’s sleeping form.

Boscha didn’t respond, and the older witch laughed, ruffling her shoulder one more time before grabbing Viney's hand and wandering off in the vague direction of town. She stood there for a moment, watching them lean on each other, struggling to keep her thoughts fixed in the moment.

“Stryder,” Willow called over, breaking her silence. Boscha met her eyes properly for the first time that night, and past the green she could still see that same hatred as she'd expected, but it was marred; uncertain in its intensity. She’d expected a reckoning, but now she had no clue what was going to pass her lips.

“Thanks,” she continued, shocking Boscha to her core. “For sticking around and all that,” the witch quickly amended, her eyes flicking to Gus and finding something there that made her nod. “You didn’t have to, but it means something that you did.”

“I-” Boscha began, but she couldn’t find the words to encapsulate the surging sea of emotions that overtook her, and settled instead on a simple nod.

And just like that, they walked away too. No confrontation, no blowout. Hardly even a raised voice, other than to _thank_ her. She… had no idea how to handle that, so she didn’t. Just pushed it down, saving it for another day.

In the midst of her focus, she didn’t even realize her hand was trembling until the one pressed to her arm started shaking along with it.

With the force of a typhoon and the control of a saint, she managed to keep all three eyes locked firmly ahead. Definitely didn’t take a peek at the bard beside her, who just so happened to catch the traitorous third but said nothing to the effect. Nope, totally in control. So in control, in fact, that she even managed to string the words together this time.

“I’m sorry,” Boscha whispered, and the depth of emotion that broke free with it surprised her as much as anyone else.

“Well, it’s a start,” Skara quipped, breaking whatever control she still had left, eyes darting to find the witch _smiling_ back at her. Weak though it may have been, watery even, it was still real, and it was _her_ and it was what she’d been missing. 

She tapped her arm, and without thinking Boscha responded to the old signal, pulling the witch off her stretcher and onto solid ground. She stumbled for maybe five seconds before regaining her usual poise, turning to the alchemist and breaking into a scowl.

“You’re not allowed to stop talking to me again,” she insisted, poking a finger into Boscha’s chest, quelling her even though she was at least two pelts shorter, “and if you do, I’m going to find you, and when I’m finished with you, I won’t be the only bard composing stories about how spectacularly gruesome your demise was.”

Boscha thought she sensed humor in her tone, but where that ended and the seriousness began was not an answer she was anywhere near qualified enough to determine. Thankfully, she was saved from any sort of out-of-her-depth deductions by Skara tugging her by the sleeve down the road and back towards town.

“Where are we going?” Boscha asked, surprised at the chuckle that bubbled past her lips. That feels sharp and foreign in a throat that hasn’t felt its like in a year. Genuine, warm even, filled with the promise of joy, of contentment.

“You,” Skara emphasized, “are walking me home.”

“Oh, I am, am I?” Boscha asked, letting that joy bleed over into her best attempt at sarcasm.

“What, you don’t want to,” Skara pouted, seemingly dead serious.

“No, I do,” Boscha quickly amended, pulling back at Skara’s surprised expression, “Completely, uh- I mean.”

“Relax, Bosch,” Skara assured her, unknowingly flaring guilt in her chest at the familiar nickname, “Would you please walk me home? You might have forgotten, but we just saw some pretty freaky shit, and I’d rather have someone with me.”

“Of course,” Bocha replied, which really meant something else, but she’d never been very good at implication, and by the way Skara brightened up and kept tugging her forward, she was fairly certain that she didn’t get the underlying message.

But then the bard’s hand left her sleeve, and she was worried she’d said too much, only for it to find her own, fingers twining between hers and holding fast. Once, twice, three times she squeezed it, and Boscha silently cursed herself for being just as bad at interpreting implications as she was at making them. That’d always been Skara’s specialty - hiding double or even triple meanings in the things she did and said. Used to poke fun at her, even, for having “three eyes and still being so blind.”

_She decided to give it a shot anyways._

Boscha squeezed back the same number of times, and for her it meant “Sorry I left,” which let her convince herself that Skara’s had held the same meaning.

Because anything else wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t even be close to appropriate after everything she’d put her though. And even if it was (which it wasn’t) it wouldn’t matter either way. She’d decided that she wasn’t meant for that sort of thing, and that was just the truth.

So she let herself be led along by the hand, even allowed a small part of herself to enjoy it, but the rest of her knew the truth, the lie, and the half-formed thing in between.

And more than anything, she knew that it wouldn’t matter either way.

But for tonight, just tonight, she could enjoy the victory. The opportunity that she’d been given to make things right. Even if it was just the start of something much longer. Because she was with her again, and she was speaking to her again, and if she’d asked her to, Boscha would have gone right back down into that cavern and woken that fae bastard up for round two.

_And Orpheus led her Eurydice into the night._

* * *

**alienation**

/,ālyəˈnāSH(ə)n/

_noun_

**\- (Psychology) a state of depersonalization or loss of identity in which the self seems unreal, thought to be caused by difficulties in relating to society and the resulting prolonged inhibition of emotion.**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus, we conclude our tale. What an incredible little aside this has been. Enormous thanks to all of you who've been so lovely with your support. Comments, kudos, subscriptions; it all comes together to make it an absolute joy to write. If you're as invested in these characters as I am, their adventures will continue in In Your Orbit, linked below, as well as a series of side stories (of which this is only the first of many). But as always, your readership is enough for me. Thank you.


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